Sakana AI Launches Namazu, a Japanese-Specialized LLM API Built on Moonshot's Kimi K2.6
Sakana AI opened access to Sakana Namazu on August 3, 2026, a Japanese-language-specialized LLM API built by fine-tuning Moonshot AI’s open-weight Kimi K2.6 on Sakana’s own proprietary Japanese data. It’s the company’s first standalone commercial LLM API product, distinct from the Fugu orchestration line.
Details
- Base model and approach: rather than training from scratch, Sakana took Moonshot AI’s open Kimi K2.6 and continued training it on internal data to sharpen performance on Japanese-language tasks and Japanese business context, while keeping the base model’s general reasoning ability
- Drop-in compatibility: the API is OpenAI-API-compatible, so existing integrations can switch over by changing only the
base_url— no code rewrite required - Built-in tools: web search and code execution are included out of the box
- Behavior tuning: Sakana says it tuned the model to reduce unnecessary refusals and output bias; it cites a jump on the FairPoliticsQA benchmark from 34.10% to 56.30% as evidence of improved handling of Japan-specific political/social nuance
- Target use cases named by Sakana: automated market-research report generation via autonomous web search and multi-step workflows; customer-support automation and order-data analysis to cut operating costs; and lighter creative demos, including an autonomous “fish light show” controlled via visual feedback
- Quote: “The choice of LLM APIs that can handle real work in Japanese is still limited” — the gap Sakana says Namazu is built to close
- Availability: live immediately via Sakana’s API Console, with pricing published on a dedicated pricing page; enterprise deployment is available on request
How to try it
- Sign up through Sakana’s API Console at console.sakana.ai and swap in the Namazu
base_url - Namazu is Sakana’s second commercial product this year, following the Marlin research-agent launch in June 2026, and its first pitched specifically at the Japanese-language business market
- Full announcement: sakana.ai/namazu-api