The AI Scientist-v2 Just Passed Peer Review — And 21% of the Reviews Were Written by AI Too

Sakana AI's AI Scientist-v2 produced the first fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review at an ICLR workshop — an end-to-end system that generates hypotheses, runs experiments, and writes papers for $20-25 each. Published in Nature. But the celebration landed in an awkward context: analysis revealed 21% of ICLR 2026 peer reviews were fully AI-generated, with over half showing some AI involvement. AI is now writing the science and reviewing it. This is the story of automated research crossing a threshold — and the integrity crisis that arrived at the same time.