Sakana AI Agentic Scientist v3: open scaffold for end-to-end AI co-discovery
Sakana AI open-sourced The Agentic Scientist (AI-Scientist-v3, Apache-2.0): a scaffold wrapping coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in a six-phase research loop with rubric-gated parallel experiments, ablations, and paper writing.
Why it matters
A development version co-authored an ALIFE 2026 oral paper (backprop-free Error Diffusion), and the authors published the Doc-to-LoRA 52%-to-98% result with candid analysis of where autonomous research still breaks.
What you could build with it
A research lab could run Agentic Scientist overnight on a standing benchmark task, arriving each morning to a scored comparison of which ideas and agent configs improved results, accelerating ablation studies that normally take weeks.
Does it hold up?
Repo is live with an 88-page arXiv paper and Docker setup; a development version co-authored an ALIFE 2026 oral paper with heavy human steering, and the authors flag real failure modes like rubric-gaming.
Built with Sakana AI Agentic Scientist v3
- Subagentic: Sakana's Agentic Scientist wraps coding agents in a research loopblog · Writeup of the announcement: how the scaffold controls what agents see, write, and how results pass between stages.
- AI Weekly: Sakana's Agentic Scientist co-authors an ALIFE 2026 paperblog · Analysis of the release with the ALIFE 2026 oral paper case study and the paper's candid failure modes.
- SakanaAI/Autoillustrategithub · 42 ★ · Sakana's companion tool released alongside the Agentic Scientist for generating publication-ready, editable figures for research papers.
Learn more
First spotted on github: source.
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