Sakana AI Opens Namazu API to Developers Building Japanese Enterprise Apps
Sakana AI opens its Japanese-specialized Namazu LLM as an API, built on Kimi K2.6 with Japan-specific fine-tuning, built-in web search, and OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
- Sakana Namazu API is live -- Sakana AI's Japanese-specialized LLM is now available via API at console.sakana.ai
- Built on Kimi K2.6 -- fine-tuned with proprietary data for Japanese language and business contexts, not trained from scratch
- Beats base model on Japan-specific benchmarks -- FairPoliticsQA score jumped from 34.10% to 56.30%; outperforms K2.6 on JFBench and translation
- Web search and code execution built in -- no extra scaffolding needed for agentic workflows
- Drop-in OpenAI replacement -- change
base_urland API key, existing code works unchanged - Enterprise-focused -- targets the gap between costly frontier models and raw open-weight models for Japanese business use
Sakana Namazu is now available as a commercial API. The Tokyo-based lab had been running Namazu inside its Sakana Chat product for months, and the consistent feedback was simple: people wanted to call it from their own code. The model is live at console.sakana.ai, and if you already have an OpenAI-compatible client, switching over is a two-line change.
What Namazu actually is
Namazu is built on Kimi K2.6, the open model published by Moonshot AI. Using its own in-house data, Sakana adapted the model to Japanese and to Japanese business contexts, tuned it to reduce unnecessary refusals, and worked to limit bias in its outputs. The result is a targeted fine-tune of an already strong open-weight base, aimed squarely at the Japanese enterprise market.
Kimi K2.6 handles text, image, and video input, supports thinking and non-thinking modes, and covers dialogue and agent tasks with stable long-horizon coding, instruction-following, and self-correction. Sakana's fine-tuning preserves those strengths while layering on Japanese fluency and cultural context the base model lacks.
The gap it fills
The Japanese enterprise LLM market has a real problem. Frontier models are costly, and using an open model as-is leaves open questions about output quality and data handling. Namazu targets the middle: a model adapted to Japanese business workflows, served through a familiar API, at a price point below the frontier tier. Sakana AI is a Tokyo-based startup founded in 2023 by co-founders including David Ha and Llion Jones, both authors of the original Transformer paper "Attention Is All You Need."