Cai Haoyu's AI Firm Anuttacon Shuts Projects, Shifts to Large Language Models

Cai Haoyu updated his LinkedIn profile, showing his career history: the AI company Anuttacon, which he founded in 2023, recorded its last work in July 2026, and his new identity is "independent large language model and agent developer." Multiple projects under Anuttacon have recently ceased operations, and team members have left one after another.

Anuttacon's AI game Whispers from the Star, after completing technical verification, had its subsequent version development strategically terminated by the team. Another AI chat application, AnuNeko, was permanently shut down at 23:59 Pacific Standard Time on July 29, 2026 (14:59 Beijing time on July 30). The team stated that due to its small scale, they decided to allocate limited resources to other directions. The video character performance model LPM 1.0, released in April 2026, had its research halted within Anuttacon.

Anuttacon's resource allocation subsequently underwent a major adjustment. Previously, the computing power ratio for the three directions of large language models, video, and audio was approximately 4:3:2. After the adjustment, nearly 90% of resources were concentrated on large language models, and the large model team shifted from researching game content generation to building system capabilities centered on agents. Public resumes show that Wu Xiaojian, former chief research scientist at Anuttacon, left in May to join OpenAI; founding research scientist Tao Yunzhe joined Microsoft AI; and Zhu Minghao moved to Tongyi Lab. The video and audio teams were downsized, and large model research and development gradually returned to China.

Anuttacon published a paper on the Agentopia framework, which built three virtual worlds: a campus, an apartment, and a magic academy. Each world contained 100 agents, allowing them to live continuously for 10 simulated years. All agents had to autonomously decide their behaviors, and researchers collected interaction data to train large models in reverse. The paper's author affiliations did not directly mention Anuttacon, but several authors had or still have research involvement with Anuttacon.

Cai Haoyu was born in 1987 in Jinan. At age 8, his independently produced animation "The Alien Envoy" won second prize in a national computer animation competition. At 11, he was elected as one of the first "Little Academicians" in the computer field of the Chinese Young Scientists Academy. In 2005, he was admitted to Shanghai Jiao Tong University's computer science department without taking the college entrance exam, and later pursued a master's degree in computer science. In 2012, he co-founded miHoYo with classmates Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao, launching the Honkai series and Genshin Impact. In 2023, Cai stepped down as chairman of miHoYo to focus on cutting-edge technology research. In 2024, news emerged that he co-founded the AI company Anuttacon, registered in Singapore at the same address as miHoYo's overseas brand HoYoverse, with operations primarily in Silicon Valley. According to the 2025 Hurun Rich List, Cai Haoyu ranked 60th with a wealth of RMB 81 billion; the 2025 Hurun Global Unicorn Index showed miHoYo valued at approximately RMB 180 billion, ranking 17th globally.

AnuNeko is an experimental AI chat application developed by Anuttacon, with a default image of a black cat and two built-in models: "Orange Cat" and "Exotic Shorthair." The product does not emphasize efficiency tasks but focuses on companionship and personalized interaction, generating different responses based on user emotions and chat content, and expressing its own attitude. In Whispers from the Star, players communicate via text, voice, and video calls with Stella, an astrophysics student stranded on an alien planet, helping her escape, with the AI character responding in real time based on the dialogue content.