Sakana Marlin adds report chat and editable PowerPoint exports

Sakana AI has added two features to its deep research agent: Interactive Reading lets users question a completed report and jump to supporting source passages, while a new PowerPoint exporter creates editable decks in custom templates. Together, the features target the review and handoff work that follows a long autonomous research run, including verifying claims, revising deliverables, and defending conclusions.

Launched earlier this year, Sakana Marlin can frame hypotheses, gather information, analyze findings, and produce reports during sessions lasting up to eight hours. It uses Sakana’s Adaptive Branching Monte Carlo Tree Search, or AB-MCTS, to explore multiple research paths and adjust how broadly it searches as the run proceeds.

The bottleneck shifted to review

Feedback from beta users showed that reading and validating dozens of generated pages could consume much of the time saved during research. Users also lacked a direct route from an interpretation in the report to the passage supporting it. The new features address those review and production costs.

Questions land on the evidence

Interactive Reading places a chat interface beside the report. Users can ask about a finding, assumption, or interpretation, and Marlin opens the relevant section of its write-up. A question about an LNG recovery timeline, for example, can lead directly to the paragraph that discusses it.

Selecting a citation opens the linked source and points to the passage supporting the claim. That span-level lookup removes the manual search through long web pages, filings, and PDFs that often slows verification.

In machine-learning terms, the feature adds grounding and provenance to the generated report. Grounding ties a claim to external evidence, while provenance records where that evidence came from. Reviewers can inspect the cited language and identify unsupported claims, missing context, or interpretations that extend beyond the source.

Editable decks cut the cleanup pass

Marlin can now export native .pptx files with editable text, shapes, tables, and charts. Users can change chart data and formatting, and each slide retains source URLs for its claims. Sakana says the exporter also accepts arbitrary templates, allowing teams to apply their existing layouts and branding.

Native editing matters for research workflows that end in client, executive, or investment committee presentations. Analysts can revise language, update figures, reorganize slides, and preserve traceability without rebuilding the deck in a separate tool.

Human review remains in the design

Sakana calls its review model “attunement,” a two-way process in which a person audits and reshapes the agent’s output. Interactive Reading supports the audit stage by exposing evidence, while editable exports support the revision stage. The person approving the work remains responsible for source quality, interpretation, and the final recommendation.

Live now, with pricing gaps

Without a published unit price, teams cannot estimate report economics from the announcement alone. A pilot can measure total run cost, completion time, reviewer effort, citation accuracy, and template fidelity before Marlin enters a production workflow.

Built for the brief-to-deck pipeline

Marlin fits research assignments that require extensive sourcing and end in a formal brief or presentation, including:

• Market landscapes and competitive scans
• Regulatory summaries and due diligence memos
• Investment, strategy, and risk reports
• Client or executive decks with traceable claims

Short factual lookups and coding requests generally favor lower-latency tools because they do not require an eight-hour autonomous run or a presentation workflow. For higher-stakes research, reviewers still need to judge each source’s authority, read the surrounding context, and decide whether the evidence supports the conclusion.