In February 2026, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs announced $1 billion in new funding for its work on spatial intelligence and world models, and in March 2026, Yann LeCun’s Advanced Machine Intelligence announced a $1.03 billion raise to build AI systems focused on reasoning, planning and world models. World models aim to model how an environment works, how it changes over time, and how actions may affect it, shifting focus from appearance to cause and effect. Fei-Fei Li and World Labs have described this as part of the push towards “spatial intelligence”: AI that can perceive, reason about and interact with the three-dimensional world. The importance of world models lies in what simulation may make possible, as a system trained or tested against a simulated environment capturing relevant real-world conditions may perform more reliably when deployed. The legal significance lies not only in the action eventually taken, but in the simulation layer used to support or justify it.