Sakana claims its AI model router Fugu Ultra v1.1 now beats Fable 5 without even including it in the pool

Sakana AI has released Fugu Ultra v1.1, an update to the AI router that distributes each query across a pool of publicly available top-tier models. The company claims performance gains of up to 7.9 points over v1.0, with the biggest jumps on ProgramBench and TerminalBench 2.1.

Fugu v1.1 reportedly beats Fable 5, even though Fable 5 isn’t part of the router’s selection pool. All of these numbers come from Sakana itself, and no independent verification exists yet. Pricing stays at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens. Sakana says it takes about two weeks of training and evaluation before a new top-tier model gets added to the pool. The architecture is described in the technical report. The update also adds a Claude Code-compatible endpoint for calling Fugu directly from the terminal. Since launch, Fugu has been available on platforms like OpenRouter and Vercel. The first Fugu version got a lukewarm reception. Critics pointed to high token usage, slow speed, and poor results. Sakana still doesn’t serve the EU or EEA, citing GDPR and “EU-specific regulations.”AdDEC_D_Incontent-1Ad Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.