Sakana AI has launched Marlin, an autonomous research assistant aimed at business users and built to carry out strategy research with minimal human input. The company says Marlin is its first commercial product and is designed to handle work that can otherwise take teams of people weeks to complete.
According to Sakana AI, users begin by entering a research topic. Marlin then clarifies the scope through a short exchange and proceeds on its own to generate hypotheses, collect information, and verify findings. The system can run for up to about eight hours and produces both executive summary slides and a detailed report that can run to dozens of pages.
The company describes Marlin as a kind of virtual chief strategy officer. Rather than simply summarizing material, it is intended to organize complex business information into structured strategic options. Sakana AI says that makes it useful for decision-makers who need a broad view of possible paths forward, as well as for teams that regularly conduct market, competitor, and risk analysis.
Sakana AI said Marlin combines research developments the company has been building over time with practical deployment experience from real-world AI projects. In its announcement, the company pointed to prior work including AI Scientist, which automates parts of scientific discovery, AB-MCTS, a system for coordinating multiple models to improve reasoning, and ALE-Agent, which automates algorithm engineering.
The company said those research efforts helped shape Marlin’s long-horizon reasoning capabilities and its ability to coordinate multiple models. Sakana AI also said it has applied AI agents in industries in Japan, and that this operational experience informed the product’s design.
Technical details were not fully laid out in the commercial launch announcement, but the company directed readers to an earlier beta-release blog post for more information.
Before the public launch, Marlin went through a closed beta that began in April 2026. Sakana AI said roughly 300 professionals participated, including people from financial institutions, operating companies, consulting firms, think tanks, and research organizations.
Those testers used the system for tasks such as strategy formulation, market research, competitive analysis, and risk assessment. Sakana AI said many participants found Marlin more effective at digging deeply into information than chat-based research tools they had used before.
Feedback from the beta group also led to changes in the product. The company said it strengthened research quality, improved output formatting, and made long-running tasks more stable before rolling out the commercial version.
Marlin is being offered through a self-serve model, with plans that include pay-per-use access as well as Pro, Team, and Enterprise tiers. Sakana AI said pricing and purchase details are available on the product page.
The company said the service is intended for a broad range of users who rely on research in their work, including corporate strategy and business planning teams, consulting firms, think tanks, and research houses.
Sakana AI framed the launch as a milestone in its commercial expansion and said it plans to keep incorporating research advances into its products. The company emphasized that it sees the next generation of AI systems as going beyond chat, with more emphasis on multi-model coordination and agents that can carry out extended workflows autonomously.
The launch adds Marlin to Sakana AI’s growing product lineup and signals a broader push to turn its research into deployable business tools.