Exa Agent Ultra: deep research at frontier quality, fraction of the cost
New highest-effort tier of Exa Agent that coordinates many agents across thousands of sources for comprehensive deep research.
Why it matters
Claims SOTA on breadth benchmarks: beats Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and Perplexity Agent at their max settings on WANDR/DeepSearchQA/WideSearch while running ~28-50% cheaper per task.
What you could build with it
An analyst or consultancy can replace dozens of narrow searches with one wide market sweep per topic and get a sourced landscape report back.
Does it hold up?
Live API today (effort:'ultra'), complex tasks take ~30min to 3h. Vendor benchmarks beat Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and Perplexity at lower cost per task, but are self-reported and not independently reproduced.
Built with Exa Agent Ultra
- Exa Launches Agent Ultra: subagent swarm deep research APIMarkTechPost · Launch writeup: live today on the Exa API as effort:'ultra'; runs longer than any other effort, 30min-3h per complex task; not open weights, not self-hostable.
- Agent Ultra turns deep research into a costly endurance testArtiverse · Independent-ish review: Ultra's 4 benchmark wins (WANDR 81.4% soft-recall, DeepSearchQA 93.9% F1) are vendor-reported and unreproduced — headline the numbers with that caveat.
- Fastest deep-research APIs for AI agents (benchmark roundup)Parallel · Benchmark comparison of deep-research APIs noting Agent Ultra launched Sept 25, after their runs — useful cost/quality context for comparing vendors.
Learn more
First spotted on engineering blog: source.
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