AI Scientist v2: how many tokens per task, and what does it cost?
AI Scientist v2 costs $10.50 per task. AgentBurn snapshot 2026-10-27. Every figure carries a provenance label: source-backed, derived, or left empty when no public basis exists.
What it is. Autonomous system that runs the full research loop and writes a paper
The AI Scientist generates hypotheses from a topic, designs and runs experiments in a sandbox, analyses results, writes a full manuscript in LaTeX and reviews its own output. Sakana's system became the first autonomous pipeline with a paper published in Nature, and independent evaluation puts a complete manuscript at $6-15 and about 3.5 hours of human supervision.
| Tokens per task | not published | Not published |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per task | $10.50 | Derived (formula shown) |
| Success rate | not published | Not published |
| Cost per solved task | not published | — |
| Tool calls per task | not published | — |
| Retry overhead | not published | — |
| Minutes per task | not published | — |
| Estimated runs per day | 1,900 (model estimate) | Model estimate |
Where the tokens go
This is the per-task split AgentBurn records for AI Scientist v2, step by step.
| Step | What happens | Share of tokens | Tool calls |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generate ideas | Surveys the topic and proposes candidate hypotheses | 8% | 12 |
| Design experiment | Writes the experiment plan and code skeleton | 12% | 16 |
| Run experiments | Executes training runs, monitors logs, fixes crashes | 34% | 74 |
| Analyse results | Parses metrics, makes plots, decides what worked | 18% | 28 |
| Write manuscript | Drafts the LaTeX paper with figures and citations | 20% | 32 |
| Self-review | Runs an automated reviewer and revises | 8% | 18 |
What each number is based on
AgentBurn labels every field. Source-backed means the cited page states the figure; derived means a formula on this page produced it; not published means no public basis exists and the field is left empty rather than estimated.
| Field | Basis | Note |
|---|---|---|
| tokensPerTask | Not published | Paper reports capability; no token counts. |
| costPerTaskUsd | Derived (formula shown) | Secondary reporting; the paper itself does not state cost per paper. |
| successRatePct | Not published | No task success rate in the same sense. |
| runsPerDay | Model estimate | No public source publishes daily run volume; this is a model estimate from pricing tiers and community reports, shown only in estimated-volume context. |
Frequently asked
How many tokens does AI Scientist v2 use per task?
No public tokens-per-task figure exists for AI Scientist v2; AgentBurn leaves the field empty rather than estimating it.
What does AI Scientist v2 cost per task?
$10.50 per task, based on the source linked in the provenance table.
Is this a vendor list price?
No. It is a per-task figure from a cited source, not a rate card; the two are not comparable.
Sources
- The AI Scientist v2 — fully automated open-ended scientific discovery (paper)
- Vendor site: https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/
- Repository: https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2
- Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08066
- Open dataset: /data/projects.json
- Methodology: how these numbers are built
Cite this page
AgentBurn (2026-10-27). "AI Scientist v2". https://getagentburn.com/projects/ai-scientist-v2/
Machine-readable: projects.json · Markdown version