- WeRide GENESIS received two major industry awards within days, including the 2026 ATTI Simulation Innovation Award and “Overall Gen-AI Solution of the Year” at the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards.
- Physical AI world model enables large-scale autonomous driving simulation, training, and validation.
- Reduces autonomous driving data collection and annotation costs by more than 75%.
- Powers WRD 3.0, WeRide’s end-to-end ADAS solution, supporting global commercialization and deployment.
GUANGZHOU, China, June 25, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — WeRide (NASDAQ: WRD; HKEX: 0800), a global autonomous driving technology company, announced today that its proprietary world model, WeRide GENESIS, has been named “Overall Gen-AI Solution of the Year” at the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards. The recognition places WeRide alongside AMD, Qualcomm, and Dell Technologies, and follows the model’s receipt of the Simulation Innovation Award at the 2026 Automotive Testing Technology International (ATTI) Awards on June 24—making it two major industry awards within 48 hours. Together, the two awards validate the model’s capabilities in accelerating autonomous driving development, simulation, and deployment.
WeRide GENESIS has won “Overall Gen-AI Solution of the Year” at the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards
Following the 2026 Automotive Testing Technology International (ATTI) Awards on June 24
While generative AI has transformed digital content creation, the next major opportunity lies in applying AI to real-world physical environments. To operate in real-world environments, AI systems must understand physical laws, causal relationships, and spatiotemporal dynamics, enabling them to take actions that are safe, stable, and executable. As a result, Physical AI is emerging as the next frontier of artificial intelligence.
This shift implies that the company capable of building the foundational layer connecting the digital and physical worlds will define the next era. Among all Physical AI applications, autonomous driving stands out as the first domain to achieve large-scale commercialization, and remains the only scenario that simultaneously enables a real-world data flywheel and sustainable commercial operations.
As one of the autonomous driving companies with the broadest global operational footprint, WeRide is emerging as a builder of this foundational Physical AI infrastructure. Through its world model, WeRide GENESIS, the company connects real-world driving environments with high-fidelity simulation, accelerating large-scale development, training, and deployment of autonomous driving systems.
WERIDE GENESIS: FOUR-LAYER ARCHITECTURE
WeRide GENESIS is constructed on four integrated capability layers:
- Physical World Reconstruction: Generates pixel-level-fidelity road environments in minutes, including rare safety-critical long-tail scenarios that are impractical to capture through real-world data collection alone.
- Physicalized Traffic Interaction: Models complex traffic dynamics—pedestrian behavior, road surface conditions, occlusion risks, and collision boundaries.
- Causal Reasoning and Inference: Models cause-and-effect relationships across traffic participants, enabling robust decision-making in dynamic environments.
- Spatiotemporal Prediction: Simulates how scenarios evolve across space and time, generating probabilistic future outcomes to support driving strategy optimization.
Together, these capabilities enable autonomous driving systems to move beyond perception toward a deeper understanding of the physical world. By training and validating systems in large-scale, high-fidelity virtual environments, WeRide GENESIS can compress millions of kilometers of road testing into days while reducing data collection and annotation costs by more than 75%.
WeRide GENESIS serves as a bridge integrating Physical AI and generative AI
Ultimately, the true value of a world model must be proven in real-world deployment. Level 4 fully driverless operation represents the most rigorous and definitive proving ground for Physical AI capabilities.
WeRide is driving its global expansion with the WeRide GENESIS as its core engine. The company’s autonomous driving products have now been deployed in more than 40 cities across 12 countries, completing cross-city, cross-border, and cross-road-environment commercial validation. Currently, WeRide’s Robotaxi has commenced fully driverless commercial operations in Guangzhou and Beijing (China), as well as in Abu Dhabi and Dubai (UAE). Meanwhile, its services are open to the public in Singapore and Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), and fully driverless public operations will soon be launched in Madrid (Spain) and Zurich (Switzerland), among other locations.
At the same time, the world model capabilities of GENESIS are making a breakthrough in the L2++ mass-production assisted driving market
At the Second China Intelligent Driving Competition, the Chery Exeed Sterra ES equipped with WeRide’s one-stage end-to-end ADAS solution, WRD 3.0, secured a historic achievement—becoming the first and only vehicle in the competition’s history to win six consecutive championships.
Across a wide range of evaluation scenarios—including urban roads, highways, and parking environments—WRD 3.0 consistently demonstrated stable, smooth, and reliable driving performance. With a significantly more efficient R&D approach, the system outperformed competitors with multiple times the resources, fundamentally redefining the traditional development path built on scaling manpower, vehicle fleets, and rule-based systems.
This breakthrough marks what can be seen as the “ChatGPT 3.5 moment” for autonomous driving.
Left: Tianjin Final (Round 6) rankings — WRD 3.0-powered Chery Exeed Sterra ES ranked No.1
Right: Hefei Round (Round 5) preliminary rankings — WRD 3.0-powered Chery Exeed Sterra ES and GAC Aion N60 ranked top two
To date, WRD 3.0 has secured mass-production design wins across more than 30 vehicle models with leading OEMs including Chery and GAC Group. As these programs advance, the capabilities of WeRide GENESIS are rapidly translating into product competitiveness for the passenger vehicle market.
The universality of physical laws allows a world model trained on urban traffic to extend into a much broader range of real-world interaction scenarios. As more vehicles, cities, and environments are integrated into a unified model foundation, WeRide GENESIS continues to amplify data value and improve development efficiency, forming a self-reinforcing flywheel from data accumulation to model training, simulation validation, and real-world deployment.
Looking ahead, WeRide will continue to advance WeRide GENESIS as the foundational platform for Physical AI, enabling AI systems not only to understand the physical world, but to operate within it at scale—accelerating the global commercialization of autonomous driving technologies.
About WeRide
WeRide is a global autonomous driving technology company and the first publicly traded Robotaxi company. Its autonomous vehicles have been tested or operated in over 40 cities across 12 countries. WeRide is the first and only technology company with autonomous driving permits in eight markets: China, the UAE, Singapore, France, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, and the United States. Through its WeRide One platform, the company provides autonomous driving products and services spanning L2++ to L4 in mobility, logistics, and other applications. WeRide was named to Fortune’s 2025 Change the World and 2025 Future 50 lists.
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