Sakana AI Trends Report

Sakana AI has agreed to a comprehensive business partnership with SCSK and Sumitomo Corporation aimed at industrial transformation and solving social issues in Japan [Sakana AI Inc. Press Release][Sumitomo Corporation]. Through this partnership, the companies will promote everything from research and development to system implementation and industrial deployment in a seamless manner.

In parallel, the company has released its latest orchestration-type AI models, "Fugu Max" and "Fugu Ultra v2" [ITmedia]【Image】[Pasquale Pillitteri]. These models aim to achieve both cost efficiency and performance by dynamically utilizing multiple AI models depending on the task.

2. Plans, Pricing, and Usage Limits

Sakana Marlin, provided by Sakana AI, has a pay-as-you-go pricing plan available [Sakana AI Marlin].

In Sakana Chat, Sakana Namazu and Fugu Max are available, with limits placed on the number of requests within a certain timeframe [gihyo.jp].

The pricing (excluding tax) for Sakana Fugu provided by FastMetal is 357.4 yen for input per 1 million tokens and 1,072.2 yen for output for Fugu Max, and 893.5 yen for input and 5,361 yen for output for Fugu Ultra v2 [FastMetal Official Blog].

3. Official announcements

2026-09-17 — Added a memory function to Sakana Chat and updated the hosted model to Fugu Max [Sakana AI]
2026-09-11 — Announced the release of "Fugu Max" and "Fugu Ultra v2" [ITmedia]【Image】
2026-09-14 — Announced an agreement with Iris Co., Ltd. to implement an evidence search tool using its Japanese-specialized LLM [Iris Press Release]
2026-09-10 — Announced agreement for a comprehensive business partnership using AI with SCSK and Sumitomo Corporation [Sakana AI Inc. Press Release]

4. Key Events (Timeline)

2026-09-17 — Added a memory function to Sakana Chat that allows conversation content to be carried over to subsequent sessions [Sakana AI]
2026-09-16 — FastMetal began providing Fugu Max and Fugu Ultra v2 through an OpenAI-compatible API [FastMetal Official Blog]
2026-09-14 — Iris Co., Ltd. agreed to adopt Sakana AI's models for its evidence search tool for doctors, "Evidence Finder" [Iris Press Release]
2026-09-11 — Released orchestration-type models "Fugu Max" and "Fugu Ultra v2" [ITmedia]【Image】
2026-09-10 — Publicly announced the comprehensive business partnership with SCSK and Sumitomo Corporation [Sumitomo Corporation]
2026-08-01 — Completed technical verification with Daiwa Securities and moved to the production development phase for full-scale implementation [Sakana AI]
2026-03 — Released Sakana Chat alongside the alpha version of Sakana Namazu [Sakana AI]

5. Community Reaction and Actual Usage

Insufficient information has been gathered.

6. Sources