Tokyo's Sakana AI launches Fugu Ultra, multi-model orchestration system matching frontier AI performance

Jun 22, 2026

Tokyo-based Sakana AI has launched Sakana Fugu and Fugu Ultra, a multi-agent orchestration system that coordinates a swappable pool of specialized models through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Grounded in Sakana's TRINITY and Conductor research, the system acts as a strategic hedge against geopolitical export controls, such as the US restrictions that blocked Anthropic's Fable 5. Fugu Ultra matches or exceeds frontier models on benchmarks like SWE-Bench Pro (73.7) and GPQA-Diamond (95.5), with pricing starting at $20/month.

Fugu multi-model orchestration launch

▪Sakana Fugu presents itself as a single foundation model that autonomously decides whether to answer directly or delegate tasks to a pool of specialized models.
▪Sakana AI launched Sakana Fugu and Fugu Ultra on June 22, 2026, as a multi-agent orchestration system accessible through a single OpenAI-compatible API.

Export control resilience strategy

▪Sakana Fugu is designed to provide resilience against vendor lock-in and geopolitical export controls by utilizing a swappable pool of underlying AI models.
▪Anthropic revoked public access to Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 on June 12, 2026, following a United States government export control order.

Orchestration architecture technical details

▪Sakana Fugu's architecture is grounded in two ICLR 2026 research papers from Sakana AI titled TRINITY and Conductor.
▪Sakana Fugu is itself a language model trained to delegate tasks, manage sub-agent communication, and synthesize results using learned coordination strategies.

Benchmark performance comparisons

▪Fugu Ultra scored 93.2 and standard Fugu scored 92.9 on LiveCodeBench, outperforming Gemini 3.1 Pro's score of 88.5.
▪Fugu Ultra scored 95.5 on GPQA-Diamond, outperforming the Claude Mythos Preview score of 94.6.
▪Fugu Ultra scored 73.7 on the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark, outperforming Claude Opus 4.8's score of 69.2 and GPT-5.5's score of 58.6.

Pricing structure tiers

▪Sakana AI offers monthly subscription tiers for Fugu at $20 for Standard, $100 for Pro, and $200 for Max.
▪Sakana Fugu is temporarily unavailable to operate or register users within the European Union and European Economic Area due to GDPR compliance processes.
▪Fugu Ultra's pay-as-you-go pricing is fixed at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens, doubling for context windows above 272K tokens.

Sakana AI company background

▪Sakana AI was founded in Tokyo in 2023 by David Ha, Llion Jones, and Ren Ito.
▪Sakana AI co-founder Llion Jones is a co-author of the seminal 2017 Google research paper 'Attention Is All You Need'.