Sakana AI released Fugu Max v1.0 and Fugu Ultra v2.0 on September 11 — not monolithic models but learned orchestration engines: a language model trained to route a task across a pool of open-weight and specialized models (including NVIDIA Nemotron) and recursively call instances of itself, via an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Fugu Max is the cost tier at $2 per million input and $6 per million output tokens; Fugu Ultra v2 is the quality tier at $5/$30 ($10/$45 above 272K context), with a 1M-token context window.

Ultra v2 ships without any proprietary frontier model in its pool — its 48.3 on Chartography reportedly beats Opus 5's 27.3 without using Opus. API-only; no downloadable weights; not available in the EU/EEA. (Filed September 21 as backfill — a significant release the sweep missed on September 11.)