Anipops relaunches for AI anime, and only 20 of our 424 AI-tagged entries are free

Anipops is back, this time as a short-form anime streaming service pitched at a global audience, relaunched by PIXTA Inc. alongside a new studio and five original series, as reported by Anime Corner.

A short-form streaming service for AI anime is a fair prompt for the neighbouring question, the one our index can actually answer: what anime tagged for artificial intelligence a reader can watch free and legally right now. Our entries carry descriptive tags, and 424 of them are tagged "Artificial Intelligence". All 424 of those pages rendered on animesphere.app today, 424 of 424 returning HTTP 200.

The census

Twenty of the 424 state a free episode count on the live page, coming to 310 stated free episodes between them. The other 404 state no free episode count at all.

Language across those twenty is not uniform:

• Five are Chinese-language works whose pages state Chinese audio with English subtitles.
• Four have pages stating Japanese audio.
• Eleven carry no language note, so what a reader would hear there is not established.

A stated free episode count is a count of stated episodes. It is not a promise about audio.

A run that finishes

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury sits on that shelf as two entries. The 2022 television series has 12 episodes recorded, and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2, from 2023, has 12 recorded as well. Recorded episode length is 24 minutes for both. Each live page states 12 free episodes, matching its full recorded run, which puts 24 stated free episodes across the pair.

In the first entry, episode 1 is a Crunchyroll upload and episodes 2 through 12 sit on a channel called GUNDAM CHANNEL INTL. Every row in the second entry is on that same channel.

Five of those uploads were opened today, at both ends of each entry. Every GUNDAM CHANNEL INTL upload among them is titled "Mobile Suit Gundam the Witch from Mercury" with the episode's own title, closing with the label "(EN dub)". Each reports an automatic English caption track, which YouTube generates from English speech, so the audio is English. That makes those uploads an English dub rather than English subtitles. The Crunchyroll upload at episode 1 of the 2022 entry is titled "Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Episode 1 English Dub" and reports an authored English subtitle track alongside the automatic one, plus authored subtitles in 13 other languages. Each of the five runs about 1,509 seconds against that 24 minute recorded length, so these are whole episodes rather than clips. None is limited to a country list.

Where it stops

PSYCHO-PASS, held as a 2012 television series with 22 episodes recorded, has a live page stating 2 free episodes. Both rows are Crunchyroll uploads and both were opened today. One is titled "PSYCHO-PASS Episode 1 English Dub" and reports an authored English subtitle track, an automatic English caption track and an authored German track. The other is titled "Those Capable | PSYCHO-PASS Episode 2" and reports an automatic English caption track. Both have English audio, and neither is restricted to a country list. Two of twenty-two is what that page states.