Undoubtedly spurred by DeepSeek's sudden incursion into the United States market, OpenAI is working to expand its presence in Asian markets, as evidenced by its newest partnership with the SoftBank Group. According to the official announcement, the SoftBank Group will earmark $3 billion yearly to deploy OpenAI's products across its companies. This includes existing offerings like ChatGPT Enterprise and the upcoming "Cristal intelligence", an advanced enterprise AI product for the Japanese market that offers custom integrations of companies' systems and data.

OpenAI and the SoftBank Group will set up a joint venture called SB OpenAI Japan to develop and market Cristal intelligence exclusively in the Japanese market. SB OpenAI Japan will be consolidated with SoftBank Corp and owned in equal parts by OpenAI and by a company established by SoftBank Group Corp and SoftBank Corp. Reportedly, OpenAI will take charge of the AI research, technology, and engineering support, and SoftBank will attend to the business side of things. SoftBank-owned chip design company Arm will lend its computing platform to support this endeavor.

OpenAI and SoftBank's shared vision for Cristal intelligence is that it will become a platform to evolve OpenAI's o1-series models into custom AI agents capable of doing knowledge work for enterprises, like generating financial reports, drafting documents, and managing customer inquiries. By automating these tasks, OpenAI and SoftBank expect that knowledge workers in Japanese companies will be able to focus on more complex tasks. Additional expectations are that the Cristal intelligence platform will set an example to be repeated in other global markets and that the agents deployed by leveraging the platform will become the foundation of future, more complex AI agents.