Most AI chatbots pride themselves on speed. Sakana AI just built one that takes its sweet time on purpose.
The Tokyo-based AI research startup launched Sakana Marlin on June 15, its first commercial product. Rather than spitting out instant responses like every other chatbot on the market, Marlin is designed to run autonomous research tasks for up to eight hours, producing comprehensive strategy reports that can stretch to roughly 100 pages.
A virtual Chief Strategy Officer, minus the corner office
Sakana AI is positioning Marlin as a “Virtual CSO,” a B2B research agent that mimics the strategic thinking process of a senior executive. The system autonomously forms hypotheses, gathers information from online sources, reconciles conflicting data, and synthesizes everything into polished deliverables, including executive summary slides.
The product grew out of two notable research efforts at Sakana AI. One is the AI Scientist framework, which earned a feature in Nature. The other is AB-MCTS, a reasoning method that was spotlighted at NeurIPS 2025.
