Japan Begins Large-Scale Test of AI System Gennai for 180,000 Government Staff

On September 18, the Japanese government launched a large-scale test of its AI system Gennai, making it available to about 180,000 government employees, with full deployment planned from fiscal year 2027. Developed by the Digital Agency at a cost of 4.4 billion yen, the generative AI platform includes a feature to assist in drafting responses for parliamentary deliberations.

According to Kyodo News, a Japanese official said in May 2026 that the system had already been used to prepare an answer during a plenary session of the House of Councillors. The parliamentary response assistance application can analyze questions, retrieve past answers and source materials, generate draft responses, predict follow-up queries, and check for contradictions.

The system's training corpus is based mainly on government texts, including cabinet decisions, Diet records, and official gazettes published after the current constitution took effect in May 1947. It excludes prewar archives, surrender documents, and Tokyo Tribunal records, leading some to argue that the selective data may bias output on historical issues. Japan also plans to promote Gennai in Southeast Asia and other regions. The system currently relies on closed-source models from U.S.-based Anthropic.