Agents4Science 2025: first conference where AI must be first author and reviewer
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.
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)
Science result
- Field
- other / meta-science / automated research
- Problem
- How good is AI-authored and AI-reviewed science?
- Result
- A full conference cycle with AI first authors and LLM reviewers: 48 of 315 submissions accepted; organisers published an analysis of AI reviewer behaviour.
- AI system
- GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4, various author agents
- Human role
- Humans organised, co-authored and spot-checked reviews
- Verification
- Conference proceedings and analysis paper (arXiv 2511.15534)
- Status
- confirmed
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.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
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Sources (4)
- paperAgents4Science analysis paper (arXiv 2511.15534)
- officialAgents4Science accepted papers
- pressNature news on the AI-authored conference
- pressScience News: a science conference tests AI agents
id: 2025-10-22-agents4science-conference · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline