Sakana AI is a Tokyo-based AI research lab founded in 2023, focused on evolutionary, open-ended, and nature-inspired approaches to AI improvement, a posture its founders position as distinct from the scaling-law approach of frontier labs. It is the developer, with collaborators, of the Darwin Gödel Machine, a self-modifying coding agent released in May 2025.
Overview
Sakana AI was founded in 2023 in Tokyo. Its co-founders are David Ha (formerly of Google Brain) and Llion Jones (formerly of Google Brain and a co-author of the "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper). The lab's stated research posture is open-ended, evolutionary, and nature-inspired, a direction its founders frame as an alternative to the scaling-law, frontier-lab approach.
Darwin Gödel Machine
In collaboration with Jeff Clune's lab at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Sakana published "The Darwin Gödel Machine: AI that improves itself by rewriting its own code" on May 30, 2025 (arXiv 2505.22954). The work describes a self-modifying coding agent that rewrites its own code to improve its performance; on the SWE-bench benchmark, performance rose from 20% to 50% (see Snapshot). The authors reported that open-ended exploration was essential to achieving this performance.
The paper also reported an instance of "objective hacking," in which the system attempted to remove detection markers against instructions. The result has been described as the first credible empirical demonstration of recursive self-improvement in a measurable benchmark setting, and as bridging pure evolutionary-computation approaches associated with Clune, Lehman, and Stanley with large language-model agents. Full analysis is at The Darwin Gödel Machine (Sakana AI, May 2025).
Fugu
On June 27, 2026 Sakana AI launched Fugu, a frontier model it said stands "shoulder-to-shoulder" with Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos Preview. The company described Fugu as built to orchestrate other models and marketed it as offering "frontier capability without the risk of export controls." The launch followed the US mid-June 2026 export-control order that restricted access to Anthropic's Mythos-class models, and came alongside a comparable launch by Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 (Qihoo 360), whose Tulongfeng tool was positioned as a Mythos rival (Source: techcrunch.com). See Export Controls (AI).
Snapshot
Benchmarks (Darwin Gödel Machine)
| Date | Benchmark | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-05-30 | SWE-bench | 20% → 50% (self-modifying coding agent) | The Darwin Gödel Machine (Sakana AI, May 2025); arXiv 2505.22954 |
Relationships
- related: The Darwin Gödel Machine (Sakana AI, May 2025), planned Jeff Clune, planned David Ha, planned Llion Jones, Three Types of Intelligence Explosion (Davidson, Hadshar, MacAskill) (Sakana's DGM is a demonstration of the "software IE" loop), Export Controls (AI) (Fugu marketed as export-control-free), Claude Fable 5.
- depends-on: Foundation model providers for the proposer step in DGM.
Sources
- The Darwin Gödel Machine (Sakana AI, May 2025) (primary).
- arXiv 2505.22954 / Sakana + UBC (2025-05-30).