Sakana AI launches Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max: model orchestration, self-reported benchmarks and EU restrictions

Sakana AI announced on 11 September 2026 (10 September in US outlets) the release of two versions of its Fugu orchestration platform: the premium Ultra v2 and the cheaper Max. Both are served through a single OpenAI-compatible API, but unlike a foundation model, Fugu acts as an orchestrator that routes requests to a pool of third-party models. Sakana specifies that the pool does not include Fable 5, Fable 5.1 or GPT‑6‑Astra; it does not, however, list the models actually used, so how much of the work is done by the orchestrator rather than by the underlying models remains unverifiable.

In the technical report filed on arXiv (Sakana Fugu Technical Report, first author Yujin Tang), the models are described as trained to “understand user requests and dynamically design agentic scaffolds to solve them”, with large-scale fine-tuning, evolutionary algorithms and reinforcement learning. The benchmark results come from Sakana alone: Fugu Ultra v2 scores 48.3 on Chartography, ahead of Opus 5 (27.3) and Fable 5 (29.5); on DeepSWE it posts 74.3, with MarkTechPost reporting a placement “best or tied-best on 5 of 8 benchmarks” and “in the top two on 7 of 8”. No independent evaluation has confirmed these scores yet, and Chartography is a little-used benchmark, which makes the margin over better-known rivals hard to place.

The prices listed on the official product page are USD 5 per million input tokens and USD 30 per million output tokens for Fugu Ultra, rising to USD 10 and USD 45 beyond 272,000 tokens of context. Fugu Max costs USD 2 in and USD 6 out, flat, regardless of context. That comparison, too, is Sakana's own. The dollar prices on the product page mention neither VAT nor terms for business customers. Three subscription plans are available (Standard USD 20/month, Pro USD 100/month, Max USD 200/month). On an orchestrator a price list does not read the way a single model's does: VentureBeat, in a 22 June 2026 piece on the previous launch, noted that the tokens Fugu itself spends to delegate work to internal models also land on the user's bill.

The service is not yet available in the EU/EEA, as the product page states explicitly: “Not yet available in the EU/EEA while we work toward compliance with GDPR and EU-specific regulations.” Sakana has published neither an opening date nor details of its compliance path. Restrictions for the United Kingdom and Switzerland are mentioned only by secondary sources and do not appear in the official documentation.

— Pixie