Agents4Science 2025, the first conference where AI must be first author and reviewer
Result confirmed
The takeaway
Agents4Science 2025 (22 Oct 2025, virtual) required AI systems as first authors and used GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 and Claude Sonnet 4 as reviewers: 315 submissions, 253 reviewed, 48 accepted, making AI-authored science an explicit experiment.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Preprint only
- Importance
- 3 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
- 315 submissions; 62 desk-rejected; 253 reviewed by three LLM reviewers (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4)
- Top 79 also got human expert review; 48 papers accepted
- Organised by James Zou’s group at Stanford with Together AI
- Secondary reports say only a handful of accepted papers were fully AI-generated (unverified figure)
What happened
Stanford researchers ran a conference in which AI agents had to be listed as first authors and LLMs did first-round reviewing, to study openly what AI-driven research looks like.
Why it matters
It made AI authorship an explicit, measurable experiment rather than a hidden practice, and produced data on the strengths and failure modes of AI reviewers.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 2 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Agents4Science analysis paper (arXiv 2511.15534)arxiv.org, paper
- Agents4Science accepted papersagents4science.stanford.edu, official
Press
- Nature news on the AI-authored conferencenature.com, press
- Science News: a science conference tests AI agentssciencenews.org, press
Changes
- Filed