Sakana’s AI Scientist-v2 writes the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review
Result confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
On 12 Mar 2025 Sakana AI reported that a paper generated end-to-end by The AI Scientist-v2 (idea, code, experiments, analysis, writing) scored 6, 7, 6 at an ICLR 2025 workshop, above the acceptance threshold; it was withdrawn by prior agreement.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Unverified claim
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Workshop: ICLR 2025 ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better’ (ICBINB); reviewer scores 6, 7, 6 (avg 6.33), higher than ~55% of human-written submissions
- Reviewers knew some submissions might be AI-generated but not which; the paper was withdrawn after review as agreed with organisers
- Workshop acceptance, not a main-conference paper; the result was a negative result on compositional regularisation
- Nature paper (2026): automated reviewer reached 69% balanced accuracy; paper quality rises with the underlying model
- Admitted weaknesses: naive ideas, weak rigour, hallucinated citations
What happened
Sakana AI, with UBC and Oxford collaborators, submitted three papers written entirely by The AI Scientist-v2 to an ICLR 2025 workshop with the organisers’ consent. One received scores of 6, 7 and 6 — above the acceptance bar — and was withdrawn before publication, as planned, because norms for AI-authored papers did not exist. The first version of the system had been released in August 2024; a peer-reviewed description appeared in Nature on 26 March 2026.
Why it matters
It was the first demonstration that a fully automated pipeline could clear human peer review, even at a workshop with a higher acceptance rate than main tracks. It set off debate about AI-generated papers flooding venues, which later led to arXiv and conference policy changes.
Sources
4 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 primary, 1 press
Primary
- Sakana AI: The AI Scientist generates its first peer-reviewed scientific publicationsakana.ai, official
- Sakana AI: The AI Scientist published in Naturesakana.ai, official
- The AI Scientist (v1) paper, arXiv 2408.06292arxiv.org, paper
Press
- Nature news on the AI Scientist papernature.com, press
Changes
- Filed