Sakana AI releases The Agentic Scientist and AutoIllustrate as open source

Sakana AI says The Agentic Scientist coordinates coding agents through research stages while humans set questions, choose directions and verify claims. It says an early version helped study Error Diffusion for a paper accepted as an oral presentation at ALIFE 2026. In autonomous runs, the system raised Doc-to-LoRA retrieval accuracy from 52% to 98% on multi-needle tasks. AutoIllustrate, also released as open source, makes scientific figures with editable draw.io files.