---
id: "2025-05-27-intology-zochi-acl-2025"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-05-27-intology-zochi-acl-2025/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2025-05-27"
date_precision: month
category: science
importance: 3
confidence: medium
status: [Result confirmed]
verification: Unverified claim
sources: 3
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/2025-05-27-intology-zochi-acl-2025/

# 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)

## 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.

## 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. [Intology: Zochi's paper accepted to ACL 2025](https://www.intology.ai/blog/zochi-acl) (intology.ai, official)
2. [ACL 2025 main conference papers](https://2025.aclweb.org/program/main_papers/) (2025.aclweb.org, docs)
3. [LessWrong discussion: Zochi publishes a paper](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LtsgfGsXpiLTSGpaW/zochi-publishes-a-paper) (lesswrong.com, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2025-03-12: [Sakana's AI Scientist-v2 writes the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-03-12-sakana-ai-scientist-v2-peer-review/index.md)