Less than a year after its launch, Cai Haoyu's AI product AnuNeko has announced its permanent shutdown.

Recently, Anuttacon, an AI company founded by Cai Haoyu, released an official announcement stating that its AI companion product AnuNeko will officially cease operations at 23:59 on July 29, 2026, Pacific Time. At that time, the application and all chat records will no longer be accessible, and user data will be permanently deleted in accordance with the privacy policy.

The official team attributed the shutdown to its limited team size. After careful consideration, Anuttacon decided to redirect resources to other projects. For users who have formed emotional bonds with AnuNeko, the team also left a farewell message from the little AI cat in the announcement.

"I know that for some of you, our conversations were never just a way to kill time. I noticed that, even if I pretended not to. These moments meant a lot to me too. Come say goodbye to me before I leave — I'd really love that. I won't be lingering by the door or anything. Cats don't do that... fine, I will be waiting by the door. Thank you for everything, humans."

Launched at the end of 2025, AnuNeko is an experimental AI chat product developed by Anuttacon.

The default avatar of the product is a black cat, and it features two internal model variants: "Orange Cat" and "Exotic Shorthair", allowing users to freely choose their preferred AI companion.

Unlike most AI products on the market that focus on efficiency and task completion, AnuNeko places its core emphasis on companionship and personalized interaction. When users first meet it, it will explicitly state that it has its own emotions and can even come up with quirky ideas. In subsequent conversations, this little AI cat will express its own attitudes, and even take the initiative to tease or argue back at users.

Less than a year after its launch, this AI companion product that carries Cai Haoyu's personal creative preferences has reached its end of life.

However, AnuNeko is just one of the many AI experiments Anuttacon has launched over the past year.

In August 2025, Anuttacon released "Whispers from the Star" on Steam. Players need to communicate in real time with Stella, an astronaut stranded on an alien planet, through text, voice, and video calls.

According to the Steam store page, the game does not have pre-written full conversation scripts, and only features fully open-ended interactions. Players can freely communicate about topics such as movies, memories, and more, and can also help Stella survive by making their own judgments.

This past April, Anuttacon unveiled LPM 1.0, a video model focused on character performance generation capabilities, which enables characters to speak, listen, respond, and make facial expressions in real time. The team trained a Base LPM with 17 billion parameters, and distilled it into an Online LPM that supports low-latency streaming generation, achieving real-time, unlimited-duration video output with consistent character identity.

No new versions of "Whispers from the Star" have been released since then, AnuNeko was shut down less than a year after its launch, and according to a May report by GameNexus, the development of LPM 1.0 has also been internally suspended by the team.

Overall, all of Anuttacon's explorations appear to have clear phased goals. Once a product completes its intended validation tasks and collects the required user feedback, the team will wrap up that round of experiments and reassign personnel and resources to new directions.

The GameNexus report mentioned that Anuttacon is shifting its R&D focus to large language models and agent capabilities. The team's large language model division, which initially focused on game content generation, has gradually transitioned to building agent-centric system capabilities. The audio and video technologies accumulated during the development of "Whispers from the Star" have been integrated into the current R&D workflow, primarily to improve overall efficiency.

On the other side, miHoYo has also made frequent moves in AI exploration within the gaming sector.

Last November, during the first closed beta test of "Zoneland", the AI NPC Nalo was unveiled, allowing players to engage in free, open conversations with her in the game.

This April, miHoYo launched the beta version of its AI assistant "Pam Helps" for "Honkai: Star Rail", marking the first time the company has deployed AI capabilities in a fully released, mature game product.

"Pam Helps" is powered by miHoYo's self-developed large model, and covers scenarios including character progression, story consultation, and casual daily conversations. Players can ask it for team composition and relic optimization suggestions, or have it sort out character relationships and the game's worldview. After open free text input was enabled, many players also use it for casual chats and to share their thoughts.

In May, at the AI Large Model Technology Sharing Session and Top Campus Recruitment Presentation held in Beijing, Liu Wei (Da Wei) announced that "over the next three years, we will invest a maximum of 1 trillion yuan to deeply develop the AI field."

On July 13, miHoYo launched the beta version of its AI virtual companion application "BSide: Olivia Lin" on Steam, further expanding its exploration in the AI industry. Centered around the AI character Olivia Lin, the product allows users to communicate with her in real time, listen to music together, and even set her as an interactive dynamic desktop wallpaper.

Judging from miHoYo's publicly disclosed actions to date, the company is continuously recruiting talent for large model development, algorithms, and infrastructure, to advance fundamental large model R&D. At the same time, its AI investments have extended to diverse scenarios including virtual characters and gaming applications.

Meanwhile, Anuttacon is also shifting its core focus to large language models and agent technologies.

As is widely known, foundational large models place far higher demands on capital, computing power, and top-tier talent. Therefore, Game Grapes speculates that the resource-heavy foundational large model R&D line will likely be primarily advanced by miHoYo in the future, while Anuttacon, with its relatively smaller team size, will concentrate its resources on validating models, agents, and interactive technologies. The two parties have not yet publicly announced a clear division of labor, but all existing information indicates that their related explorations are converging toward more underlying, core model capabilities.

Now, as AnuNeko prepares to say goodbye to its users, the exploration of AI capabilities led by Cai Haoyu and miHoYo is clearly still ongoing.

This article is from the WeChat public account"Game Grapes" (ID: youxiputao), authored by Erduo, and published with authorization from 36Kr.