Stanford researchers automate conversion of research papers into interactive AI agents

A Stanford team introduced Paper2Agent, an automated pipeline that converts research papers into functional AI agents. Published in Nature on September 16, 2026, the system transforms papers into agents that can rerun the original research methods on demand. In a test with 100 computational biology papers, 74 were successfully converted into working agents that extracted 593 validated tools. These agents outperformed alternative AI approaches, scoring 91.2% versus 82.7% on benchmark questions. The system serves as both a reproducibility audit and a practical tool for executing complex research methods.