Japan launches GENAI for government

Japan’s Digital Agency has started rolling out a government-run generative artificial intelligence platform called GENAI to ministries and agencies across the country. About 180,000 national government employees are expected to get access during fiscal year 2026. (digital.go.jp) GENAI is the Digital Agency’s in-house environment for tasks like chat, document drafting, summarization, proofreading and translation. The agency says it is being deployed to all ministries and agencies as a “safe and secure” system for official work. (digital.go.jp) The current phase is a large-scale pilot that runs from May 2026 through March 2027. Ministries and agencies that want to keep using GENAI after that are expected to submit budget requests for fiscal year 2027 and beyond. (digital.go.jp) Generative artificial intelligence systems work by predicting the next word or token in a sequence, which lets them answer questions, rewrite text and summarize long documents. Japan is applying that to administrative work where staff spend large amounts of time drafting replies, checking language and searching records. (digital.go.jp) The Digital Agency has framed the project as part of a broader response to Japan’s labor shortage and aging population. In an August 29, 2025 update on internal testing, the agency said national and local governments would need to use artificial intelligence more actively to maintain and strengthen public services. (digital.go.jp) GENAI also marks a policy choice about control. Instead of relying only on off-the-shelf commercial tools, the government is building a common environment it can govern itself while adding specialized applications for work such as Diet response searches and legal research support. (digital.go.jp) Japan is tying that rollout to domestic model development. On March 6, 2026, the Digital Agency said it had selected 7 large language models from 15 applicants for trial use in GENAI, including models from NTT Data, NEC, Fujitsu, SoftBank and Preferred Networks. (digital.go.jp) The agency said those models must run in a government cloud inference environment and be secure enough for officials to handle “Confidentiality Level 2” information. It plans to start trial use of domestic models in GENAI around August 2026 and publish part of the evaluation results around January 2027. (digital.go.jp) Japan has already been adding specific tools to the system. In December 2025, the Digital Agency said it would provide Preferred Networks’ PLaMo Translate inside the Gennai project, with internal use starting in December and expansion to other ministries and agencies from 2026 onward. (digital.go.jp) For now, the test is whether a single government platform can make routine paperwork faster without giving up control over security, procurement and model choice. The next deadlines are already set: domestic model trials are due to begin in August 2026, and full procurement decisions are under consideration for fiscal year 2027. (digital.go.jp)