# Exa launches Agent Ultra API for exhaustive research tasks

Digest AI · Agents & Tools · published 2026-09-26T08:04:08Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/exa-launches-agent-ultra-api-for-exhaustive-research-tasks

## Summary

Exa has released Agent Ultra, the highest effort level of its Exa Agent API, designed for research tasks that require exhaustive coverage such as large list building and entity enrichment. The system splits tasks into subtasks and assigns parallel subagents, routing frontier models to complex steps and faster models to simpler ones. Exa reports that Agent Ultra outperforms Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra, and Perplexity Agent on four research benchmarks when competitors are set to their maximum effort.

According to Exa’s launch post, Agent Ultra achieves a 12.6% improvement over Opus 5.5 on the WANDR benchmark at half the cost per task. It also shows a 1579% gain over Opus 5.5 on the Company Find-All benchmark. These figures are vendor-reported and have not yet been independently reproduced. Typical runs take about 30 minutes, though very hard tasks can take up to 3 hours.

Agent Ultra is available as a hosted API and is not open weights. Pricing is metered at standard Agent usage rates, with a default cap of $20 per run, adjustable between $1 and $100. The tool targets model providers, financial services, and go-to-market teams for tasks like training data assembly, due diligence, and account list enrichment.

## Key points

- Exa released Agent Ultra, its highest effort API mode for exhaustive research and list building.
- Exa reports Agent Ultra beats Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra, and Perplexity Agent on four benchmarks.
- Runs cost up to $20 by default and typically take about 30 minutes to complete.

## Why it matters

Agent Ultra offers a specialized API for exhaustive data collection, potentially reducing the time and cost for companies needing large-scale entity enrichment or training data assembly compared to general-purpose agents.

## Sources

1. [Exa Launches Agent Ultra: A Subagent Swarm Deep Research API Built for Exhaustive List Building](https://marktechpost.com/2026/09/26/exa-launches-agent-ultra-a-subagent-swarm-deep-research-api-built-for-exhaustive-list-building) (MarkTechPost, 2026-09-26)

## Cite

Digest AI, "Exa launches Agent Ultra API for exhaustive research tasks", 26 September 2026, https://digestai.news/story/exa-launches-agent-ultra-api-for-exhaustive-research-tasks

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