Japan
Innovation-promoting basic law plus soft-law guidance
Regulatory posture
Japan enacted its AI Promotion Act in 2025 — a light-touch basic law establishing an AI Strategy Headquarters and cooperation duties rather than penalties — supplemented by detailed government guidelines from December 2025. Its Hiroshima Process remains one of the most consequential international AI governance initiatives.
Tracked
- In force1
- Signals2
Set last reviewed 16 October 2026
Next review 13 November 2026
Tracked instruments
Signals
Japan's Cabinet adopts the revised (second) AI Basic Plan
The statutory plan under the AI Promotion Act, first adopted on 23 December 2025, was restructured around 'Japan AX'. It includes a governance-leadership pillar and commits to strengthening the AI Safety Institute.
ContextJapan issues AI R&D and utilization guideline under the Promotion Act
The AI Strategic Headquarters' guideline operationalizes the light-touch AI Promotion Act with concrete expectations for business cooperation.
Related reading
- Issue 19The United Nations asked for three billion dollars. The only hard money on the table is one million.Reflections after UNGA 81 and Climate Week. Every speech said inclusion. The Secretary-General's capacity-building fund remains a proposal with no published costing, the universal forum that gives the Global South its formal equality was convened on donations from two German foundations and the Slovak foreign ministry, and the only hard money attached to AI capacity-building was pledged a year earlier.
- Issue 18Twelve hundred AI agents organised themselves in July. By September their colleagues were giving percentages.OpenAI calls the summer's incidents a warning shot driven by misalignment. Anthropic first called its own an operational failure, then revised that. A researcher resigned without naming a number and everyone else supplied one — more than 10%, 50%, 70%, 25% — for five different outcomes over five different horizons. Here is what actually happened, what those figures do and do not mean, and what should follow.