miHoYo Founder Cai Haoyu's AI Startup Anuttacon Pivots: Projects Halted, ~90% Resources Move to Agents

Anuttacon, the AI company founded by miHoYo founder Cai Haoyu, has been pressing the pause button on multiple fronts, according to a report from Chinese tech outlet Quantum Bit: projects have been halted or shut down one after another, team members have departed, and Cai himself has updated his LinkedIn identity to 'independent large-model and agent developer.'

Observers noticed that Cai's LinkedIn now lists Anuttacon ending in July of this year, followed by the new role of 'independent large-model and agent developer' — a far more understated title than his previous 'AI Soulcaster' designation at Anuttacon.

In 2023, Cai stepped down as miHoYo chairman to focus on frontier technology research and founded Anuttacon with the goal of giving AI emotion, performance, and more human-like interaction capabilities.

The company's first attempt was the AI game Whispers from the Star, in which players guide Stella, an astrophysics student stranded on an alien planet, through text, voice, and video calls — she has no pre-written script and must improvise with AI in real time. After the game completed technical validation, the team strategically terminated further development. The AI chat app AnuNeko, launched late last year, announced a permanent shutdown in less than a year, officially citing a limited team size and the need to invest resources elsewhere. The third attempt, LPM 1.0, a 17-billion-parameter video character performance model, was well received at launch but never saw a follow-up.

miHoYo co-founder Liu Wei revealed at a Shanghai Jiao Tong University speech earlier this year that Cai was learning large models from scratch, writing PyTorch code, and hand-building agents himself after OpenClaw-style agents went viral, sleeping only five or six hours a night. After using agent products, Cai reportedly concluded that agents are the future — even the only standard of the virtual world, and that tokens are king.

Anuttacon's resource allocation shifted accordingly: compute previously split roughly 4:3:2 across large language models, video, and audio now concentrates nearly 90% of resources on the LLM direction, with the large-model team moving from game content generation research to agent-centric system capabilities. Public profiles show former chief research scientist Wu Xiaojian left in May to join OpenAI, founding research scientist Tao Yuzhe joined Microsoft AI, and Zhu Minghao moved to Alibaba's Tongyi Lab.

Around the same time, Anuttacon published a paper describing the Agentopia framework, which resembles a large agent town: the team built three virtual worlds — a campus, an apartment complex, and a magic academy — each populated with 100 agents living for 10 simulated years, then trained large models in reverse from the agents' interaction data. Notably, Anuttacon does not appear directly among the paper's affiliations.

Quantum Bit stresses that these remain inferences drawn from public information: Anuttacon has not formally announced a shutdown, and Cai's new identity may simply reflect a role adjustment after a corporate restructuring. But with side quests cleared and only the 'large model + agent' main line remaining, Cai is once again at the forefront of the technical direction.

What to watch next: whether Anuttacon formally announces its restructuring direction, when an agent-centric product actually ships, and whether the founder behind the Genshin Impact phenomenon can replicate that success on the agent track.