Intology's 'Zochi' AI system gets a paper into the ACL 2025 main conference
In May 2025 Intology said its autonomous research agent Zochi produced 'Tempest', a paper on multi-turn LLM jailbreaking via tree search, that was accepted to the main conference of ACL 2025 (acceptance rate ~20%) — claimed as the first AI-generated paper to pass peer review at an A* main venue.
Key facts
- Paper: 'Tempest: Automatic Multi-Turn Jailbreaking of LLMs with Tree Search'
- Meta-review score 4/5; Intology claims it ranked in the top 8.2% of submissions
- Human role per Intology: manuscript preparation only (figures, citation formatting, minor fixes)
- Autonomy claims are self-reported; exact announcement day not verified (month precision)
Science result
- Field
- computer-science / NLP / AI safety
- Problem
- Automated research reaching a top-tier main conference
- Result
- An AI-generated paper on automated multi-turn jailbreaking was accepted to the ACL 2025 main conference.
- AI system
- Zochi
- Human role
- AI-assisted: agent claimed to handle ideation, experiments and writing; humans formatted the manuscript
- Verification
- Peer review at ACL 2025 (acceptance confirmed); autonomy self-reported
- Status
- confirmed
What happened
Intology's agent Zochi generated a method (Tempest) for automatically jailbreaking language models over multiple conversation turns using tree search, ran the experiments and drafted the paper, which passed ACL 2025 main-track peer review.
Why it matters
It moved AI-authored research from workshop level (Sakana, March 2025) to a selective main track within months, though the degree of autonomy could not be independently audited.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
Sources (3)
- officialIntology: Zochi's paper accepted to ACL 2025
- docsACL 2025 main conference papers
- discussionLessWrong discussion: Zochi publishes a paper
id: 2025-05-27-intology-zochi-acl-2025 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline