Where the research loop itself runs autonomously: the labs’ science programs, the productized research agent, and the formal-proof engines pointed at the hardest open problems.
- Agon - the MIT Claude Code plugin running adversarial producer-critic factories from a one-line topic to experiments and a paper draft, with a candid failure-mode taxonomy.
- AlphaProof - DeepMind’s Lean reinforcement-learning solver, from IMO silver in 2024 to officially graded IMO gold via Deep Think in 2025.
- Anthropic Claude mathematical research - the Claude Code subagent loop that raised the zeta zero bound to 67.2 percent and formalized Fermat’s Last Theorem in 11 days.
- FutureHouse Robin - the nonprofit’s Nature-published wet-lab loop that proposed and validated ripasudil for dry AMD, with people at the bench and its own ablations as the critique, 730 stars as of 2026-10-06.
- GPT Researcher - the Apache-2.0 open deep-research agent running the plan-search-filter-write loop on any LLM since 2023, cited in 150-plus papers as the baseline, 29.9k stars as of 2026-10-07.
- Harmonic Aristotle - the free agentic theorem prover with a Lean-checked Erdős result, now aimed at software correctness, judged and contested on FormalQualBench.
- Local Deep Research - the community’s MIT local-first research agent running an agentic search loop over arXiv, PubMed, and your own encrypted document index on local models, 9,159 stars as of 2026-10-07.
- Math Inc. Gauss - the autoformalization agent behind Strong PNT and the sphere-packing proof, with the comparator-audited OpenGauss harness, as of 2026-09-13.
- OpenAI Deep Research - the productized web-research agent, the breadth-first loop with no machine judge behind it.
- OpenAI for Science - the lab program from FrontierMath’s first open-problem solve to the disputed Navier-Stokes claim, as of 2026-09-13.
- OpenResearch - alphaXiv’s MIT local-first workspace that turns Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, or Antigravity into research agents with an experiment tree and an autonomous loop, 6,687 stars as of 2026-10-07.
- Pion - Andon Labs’ closed research preview where persistent agents run a real business with payment tools, the Vending-Bench lineage made product.
Its members are compared on shared rows in the Automated Research Feature Matrix.
Changes #
- 2026-09-13 - Added AlphaProof.
- 2026-09-13 - Added Anthropic Claude mathematical research.
- 2026-09-13 - Added Harmonic Aristotle.
- 2026-09-13 - Added Math Inc. Gauss.
- 2026-09-13 - Added OpenAI Deep Research.
- 2026-09-13 - Added OpenAI for Science.
- 2026-09-16 - Added Pion.
- 2026-09-27 - Added Agon.
- 2026-10-05 - Added OpenResearch.
- 2026-10-06 - Added FutureHouse Robin.
- 2026-10-07 - Added Local Deep Research.
- 2026-10-07 - Added GPT Researcher.