Onyx, an open-source deep research system, ranks No. 1 by removing search access from its orchestrator agent

Onyx has been ranked No. 1 on DeepResearch Bench. The system uses a counterintuitive architecture where the orchestrator agent that runs the entire research strategy has no search access, preventing it from querying the web or opening URLs.

The system operates in three phases: Phase 1 decomposes the query into up to 6 research directions; Phase 2 dispatches 3 isolated research agents, each running up to 8 sub-cycles of search, read, and think to produce intermediate reports with citations; Phase 3 produces a unified report with deduplicated citations. Keeping the architecture only two levels deep prevents information distortion through multiple summarization steps.

By stripping search capability from the orchestrator, the system forces it to write self-contained task briefs for each research agent instead of prematurely answering questions with surface-level results. The implementation is available on GitHub and can be tried directly.