Kaito Founder Releases Detailed Timeline Showing No Prior Notice of X Policy Changes

Yu Hu, the founder of Kaito AI, has provided a comprehensive account of events surrounding the platform’s removal of Yaps and its incentive leaderboard, addressing speculation about whether the team had advance knowledge of X’s upcoming policy changes. According to PANews reporting on January 16, the chronology of events clearly demonstrates that Kaito operated reactively rather than proactively to the X platform’s announcement.

The Chronology: How X’s Policy Review Unfolded

The sequence of events reveals a compressed timeline with minimal advance notice. On January 13, the Kaito team received an initial email from an X platform account manager flagging a possible policy reassessment. Following this notification, the team issued a formal legal response that same day after receiving official legal documentation. Two days later, on January 15, both the Kaito team and the public simultaneously encountered a public statement from Nikita Bier, X’s product manager, announcing the concrete policy changes. This parallel timing—where management and general audiences learned of the policy simultaneously—underscores the claim that no privileged advance information was available.

Why Kaito Waited Before Making a Statement

Rather than immediately issuing a defensive announcement, the Kaito team opted for a measured response based on lessons learned from previous interactions with X. Yu Hu explained that this was not the first instance of legal notifications from the X platform. During an earlier dispute, the issue had been resolved through a collaborative new corporate agreement rather than confrontation. This precedent informed the team’s decision to prioritize dialogue and clarification over premature public statements. The team’s restraint—choosing to wait for further communications rather than rushing to address speculation—reflected institutional memory of how such matters could be constructively resolved.

Strategic Shift: Kaito Studio Becomes Core Platform

With the discontinuation of Yaps, Kaito is accelerating deployment of its Kaito Studio platform, which had been under development for several months. Originally envisioned as a complementary product to the Yaps model, Kaito Studio is now positioned to become the cornerstone of Kaito’s cross-platform strategy for 2026. Other revenue streams and business operations remain unaffected by the X policy changes, suggesting the company has engineered a contingency transition rather than facing an existential threat from the platform’s intervention.