{
  "id": 19041,
  "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12036v1",
  "title": "Mechanist: AI as a Scientific Instrument for Discovering the Mechanisms of Intelligence",
  "summary": "AI models have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, yet the mechanisms underlying their capabilities and the risks they may pose remain poorly understood. As AI development becomes faster and increasingly automated, mechanistic exploration remains largely manual, widening the gap between what models can do and our ability to understand and control them. To bridge this gap, we introduce Mechanist, an agentic system that uses AI as a scientific instrument for the autonomous discover",
  "authors": "Mengru Wang, Junfeng Fang, Shuofei Qiao, Zhenqian Xu, Haoming Xu, Haoxiong Wang, Shumin Deng, Linyi Yang, Zhixiang Cui, Xin Xu, Yunzhi Yao, Buqiang Xu, Fei Shen, Haozhe Luo, Yunxiang Wei, Ningyu Zhang, Julian McAuley, Tat Seng Chua, Huajun Chen",
  "category": "research",
  "topics": "agents-autonomy",
  "orgs": null,
  "regions": null,
  "published_at": "2026-08-12T13:19:42.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-08-13T05:10:37.786Z",
  "source_slug": "x-arxiv-cs-ai",
  "source_name": "arXiv cs.AI",
  "source_homepage": "https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/recent",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/19041",
  "original_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12036v1",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}