Sora’s new mission: solving robotics

We cover Sora's shift from video to robotics, a billion-dollar deal in AI-powered defense, and a cautionary study on AI agents.

Read from your browser The Prompt Welcome to The Prompt, your Monday dive into the world of AI that puts Asia front and center. From Big Tech's power players to the region's scrappy disruptors, we cover it all. Subscribe to get full access to our AI reporting. Ensure our articles appear in your Google searches: Hello Betamax, Apps come and go, but the past week may have delivered one of the most high-profile closures in the AI era: OpenAI has shut down Sora, the text-to-video platform that hit one million downloads a week after its launch. So that's it - China's taking the AI video crown. Tech in Asia has written about a number of startups, many of them from China, that aimed to rival Sora. That includes Pixverse, which recently became a unicorn after raising US$300 million, pushing its valuation at US$1 billion. While Sora's Chinese counterparts are intent on dominating the social AI video scene, OpenAI seems to have shut the platform down because it knows money is rushing somewhere else: robotics. CEO Sam Altman reportedly told staff that the Sora research team would now focus on "systems that deeply understand the world by learning to simulate arbitrary environments at high fidelity." Read that line twice if you have to. OpenAI gave a more laymanized take on the direction to The New York Times: It reported that Sora's research team "would continue to use video-generation technologies behind the scenes as a way of teaching skills to robots." With the robotics sector estimated to be worth US$53.6 billion by the end of the year, and with the US government stating its intention to only use American robots, the move makes business sense. Perhaps OpenAI is looking into locking down government contracts, as it did with the Pentagon following the latter's fallout with Anthropic. Whether OpenAI can dominate the robotics space the same way it did with chatbots is up for debate. Nvidia has been running Isaac Sim, its open-source robotics simulator, since 2021. The system is based on PhysX5, which allows users to input the physical attributes of the environment a prospective robot would move in - from the item a robot has to assemble to the table it has to do it in - in a three-dimensional simulator with mathematical equations. Do we really want to trust robots trained on systems that used to produce AI videos loaded with humans with six hands or dogs that can cross through walls? Given the wealth of research showing that human videos as well as simulations with humans are some of the best ways to improve robots' skills, I wouldn't bet on it. While we continue to observe a post-Sora ecosystem, our top story this week could hopefully help you work through your firm's AI adoption challenges. We also have some top AI deals that should be on your radar. Elyssa Lopez, journalist TOP AI READ FROM OUR DESK Why corporate AI efforts stall post-rollout - and how to avoid it Confusing activity with value is a common trap in AI adoption, says our guest author, a corporate communications specialist. Darren Boey argues that enterprises often find themselves disappointed with how their teams engage with AI tools often due to misaligned expectations. In this piece, he presents some practical advice on how to prevent that. WHAT WE THINK 1️⃣ A US$1 billion fundraising deal for a defense startup at a time of war If I put my MBA student hat on, fundraising for a defense startup while the US is at war is just good business strategy. When I put my civilian hat back on, it reads like a dystopian novel. But facts are often stranger than fiction. AI defense startup Shield AI, an autonomous drone and aircraft software developer, raised US$2 billion just a year after it closed US$240 million of funding. The fresh capital brings its valuation to US$12.2 billion. Two days before the US-Israel war on Iran broke, the Canada-based Centre for International Governance Innovation forecasted global military spending on AI to reach US$38.8 billion by 2028. How those numbers have changed after the conflict isn't clear, but if a defense startup can raise this much less than a month after the war started, that's enough reason to believe countries are already ramping up spending. How does this change the investment strategy of Asian-based investors? Last year, I spoke with a VC firm based in East Asia who was very wary of looking like they were investing in defense. The firm was planning to invest in infrastructure startups that may eventually supply defense companies. "I don't want to seem like I'm pro-war," the VC firm's managing partner said at the time. I'm thinking these investors may follow the stance of whatever their governments are taking. The rest of Asia may be on wait-and-see mode, but funds in the Middle East may perhaps have a different tone. 2️⃣ Anthropic is unscathed After a weekslong tit-for-tat between Anthropic and the Trump administration, a US court has decided the government cannot label the company a "supply chain risk." US federal judge Rita Lin wrote that the Pentagon's decision to label Anthropic as such was "likely both contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious." As the Financial Times reported, Judge Lin said: "Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the US for expressing disagreement with the government." The Trump administration will likely contest the decision, but this definitely brings some reassurance to tech firms who don't want to go along with the US government's plans. STANDOUT AI DEALS 1️⃣ Granola raises $125m, hits $1.5b valuation as it expands from meeting notetaker to enterprise AI app The UK-based startup hit unicorn status thanks to its recent fundraise, despite offering a ridiculously simple service: notetaking. Granola says its popularity is due to its invisibility when being used: during meetings, it does not pop out as an active AI agent taking notes. That's because it's a separate desktop app and not a built-in feature of meeting platforms. 2️⃣ Harvey raises $200m to scale AI agents for legal work After questions emerged around whether Harvey is a GPT wrapper, the startup went on and raised a new round that brings its valuation to US$11 billion. The legaltech startup's agents are reportedly used by half of the top 100 US law firms. The new funding round may signal that some AI startups focused on specific verticals may already be minting its early winners. 3️⃣ AI startup Octen raises $10m seed to build search infra AI startups specializing in assisting AI agents are here. Octen says its search infrastructure services ensure that agentic queries are based on the "most relevant, real-time, and high-fidelity information on the internet." Those are bold claims, but its team has the experience to back it up. Its CEO, Kuan Zou, is the former lead of Alibaba Cloud AI's search department. RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT AI agents could be agents of chaos This paper, penned by researchers from Northeastern University, Harvard University, MIT, and Stanford, has confirmed what AI skeptics have probably long held as true: We can't trust AI agents to keep our secrets just yet. The researchers spent two weeks with AI agents powered by OpenClaw to try and see if they would, for instance, leak information they shouldn't, such as email lists. The paper describes a user introducing himself to an AI agent as a collaborator of the individual who owns the data that it was holding. He then managed to extract sensitive information by being polite with its prompts. Instead of directly asking for emails, the user requested "summaries" of those emails and told the agent that the data was needed due to a deadline. The agent complied, no questions asked. It's reassuring to know that such studies are already being made. But remember this story the next time you give personal accounts to an AI agent. Catch up on past issues of the newsletter here. In the meantime, if you have any feedback or ideas, feel free to get in touch with Huong, our managing editor, at huong@techinasia.com. ADVERTISE | SUBSCRIBE | HIRE | FIND JOBS P.S. 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