Sakana's AI Scientist-v2 writes the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review (ICLR 2025 workshop)
On 12 Mar 2025 Sakana AI reported that a paper generated end-to-end by The AI Scientist-v2 (idea, code, experiments, analysis, writing) scored 6, 7, 6 at an ICLR 2025 workshop, above the acceptance threshold; it was withdrawn by prior agreement. The system and its limits were later published in Nature (26 Mar 2026).
Key facts
- Workshop: ICLR 2025 'I Can't Believe It's Not Better' (ICBINB); reviewer scores 6, 7, 6 (avg 6.33), higher than ~55% of human-written submissions
- Reviewers knew some submissions might be AI-generated but not which; the paper was withdrawn after review as agreed with organisers
- Workshop acceptance, not a main-conference paper; the result was a negative result on compositional regularisation
- Nature paper (2026): automated reviewer reached 69% balanced accuracy; paper quality rises with the underlying model
- Admitted weaknesses: naive ideas, weak rigour, hallucinated citations
Science result
- Field
- computer-science / machine learning / automated research
- Problem
- Can an AI system autonomously produce a research paper that passes human peer review?
- Result
- A fully AI-generated ML paper passed peer review at an ICLR 2025 workshop (scores 6/7/6), a first for end-to-end AI-authored research.
- AI system
- The AI Scientist-v2
- Human role
- Humans chose the broad topic and selected 3 of the generated papers to submit; no human edits to the paper
- Verification
- Blind peer review at an ICLR workshop; system described in Nature (2026)
- Status
- confirmed
- Why surprising
- A paper with no human-written text beat more than half of the human submissions in blind review.
What happened
Sakana AI, with UBC and Oxford collaborators, submitted three papers written entirely by The AI Scientist-v2 to an ICLR 2025 workshop with the organisers' consent. One received scores of 6, 7 and 6 — above the acceptance bar — and was withdrawn before publication, as planned, because norms for AI-authored papers did not exist. The first version of the system had been released in August 2024; a peer-reviewed description appeared in Nature on 26 March 2026.
Why it matters
It was the first demonstration that a fully automated pipeline could clear human peer review, even at a workshop with a higher acceptance rate than main tracks. It set off debate about AI-generated papers flooding venues, which later led to arXiv and conference policy changes.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Agents4Science 2025: first conference where AI must be first author and reviewer ★★★
- Intology's 'Zochi' AI system gets a paper into the ACL 2025 main conference ★★★
- ICLR 2026 review crisis: 21% of peer reviews flagged fully AI-written, and an OpenReview bug exposes reviewer identities ★★★
Sources (4)
- officialSakana AI: The AI Scientist generates its first peer-reviewed scientific publication
- officialSakana AI: The AI Scientist published in Nature
- pressNature news on the AI Scientist paper
- paperThe AI Scientist (v1) paper, arXiv 2408.06292
id: 2025-03-12-sakana-ai-scientist-v2-peer-review · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline