Sakana AI
The Tokyo-based lab behind Fugu, and this spoke’s first Japanese entry — the provider map here has run US labs, Chinese open-weight labs, one European (mistral-ai) and one Canadian (cohere).
What’s on the evidence in this corpus is the product: a console, an API with per-key provider pools, a model family, and paid access fugu-get-started. That makes it a provider in this spoke’s sense while being, underneath, a composer of other providers’ models — a position none of the labs paged here occupies. Its own model family name is the thing it sells; the models doing the work may be someone else’s.
Its distribution choice is worth noting: Fugu ships as a drop-in provider for the Codex CLI and Claude Code rather than as a chat product. The lab is selling into other people’s harnesses, which is a different go-to-market from the frontier labs’ assistant apps and from the open-weight labs’ downloads.