---
id: "2025-03-12-sakana-ai-scientist-v2-peer-review"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-03-12-sakana-ai-scientist-v2-peer-review/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2025-03-12"
date_precision: day
category: science
importance: 4
confidence: high
status: [Result confirmed]
verification: Unverified claim
sources: 4
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-03-12-sakana-ai-scientist-v2-peer-review/

# Sakana's AI Scientist-v2 writes the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review

Full title: Sakana's AI Scientist-v2 writes the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review (ICLR 2025 workshop)

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code, experiments, analysis, writing) scored 6, 7, 6 at an ICLR 2025 workshop, above the acceptance threshold; it was withdrawn by prior agreement. The system and its limits were later published in Nature (26 Mar 2026).

## 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- Reviewers knew some submissions might be AI-generated but not which; the paper was withdrawn after review as agreed with organisers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 One received scores of 6, 7 and 6 — above the acceptance bar — and was withdrawn before publication, as planned, because norms for AI-authored papers did not exist.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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Sakana AI: The AI Scientist generates its first peer-reviewed scientific publication](https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-first-publication/) (sakana.ai, official)
2. [Sakana AI: The AI Scientist published in Nature](https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-nature/) (sakana.ai, official)
3. [The AI Scientist (v1) paper, arXiv 2408.06292](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292) (arxiv.org, paper)
4. [Nature news on the AI Scientist paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00899-w) (nature.com, press)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2025-10-22: [Agents4Science 2025, the first conference where AI must be first author and reviewer](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-10-22-agents4science-conference/index.md)
- 2025-05-27: [Intology's 'Zochi' AI system gets a paper into the ACL 2025 main conference](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-05-27-intology-zochi-acl-2025/index.md)