Fugu Max

A new cost-optimized tier of Sakana AI's Fugu orchestration family, launched alongside Fugu Ultra v2 on September 11 2026. Like the rest of the family it is a learned multi-agent orchestration engine that routes tasks across a swappable pool of open-weight and specialized models (built on Sakana's ICLR 2026 TRINITY and Conductor methods) rather than a single monolithic model, avoiding dependence on any one proprietary frontier model. Sakana is explicit that Max and Ultra v2 are not separate products but the same core orchestration architecture pointed at different missions — Ultra v2 chases peak capability, Max chases cost. Fugu Max is priced at $2/$6 per Mtok input/output with cached input at $0.25, undercutting the output cost of frontier models such as Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 Terra, and Kimi K3 by roughly 40-60%. On Sakana's self-reported evaluations it claims the best overall score across six benchmarks including Terminal-Bench 2.1, GPQA-Diamond, AA-LCR, GDP.pdf, AutomationBench, and SWEFish. Parameter count, architecture detail, and context ceiling are undisclosed; figures are system-level and unverified at launch.