TL;DR
A Japanese government panel has broadly approved a “principle code” asking generative AI companies to publish which models they use, what data trained them, and how that data was gathered. It is non-binding and runs on comply-or-explain. Foreign providers offering AI services in Japan are covered too.
Three principles, one enforcement mechanism
The draft went before an expert panel on intellectual property in the AI era and rests on Japan’s AI technology law, passed in May 2025. Its stated aim is to hold rights protection and innovation in the same frame rather than trading one against the other.
The first principle asks providers — model developers and service operators alike — to publish, in a publicly accessible place, the models they run, the data behind them and the collection methods used. Sensitive information is exempt from that requirement. The second obliges a firm to say whether particular webpages formed part of its training set when a rights holder alleging infringement asks. The third requires responses to users worried they may be infringing copyright themselves.
Nothing here compels compliance. A company either signs up, announces as much on its website and notifies the government, or declines and states publicly why. British readers will recognise the mechanism: comply-or-explain is the spine of the UK Corporate Governance Code, where it has worked reasonably well at forcing disclosure and considerably less well at changing behaviour among those content to explain.
Why the third principle matters most
The rights-holder query provision is the one with teeth, modest though they are. Today a writer or publisher who suspects their work was scraped has no reliable way to find out. A duty to answer that question, even a voluntary one, converts an unanswerable grievance into a documented refusal — which is the raw material litigation and legislation both need.
Looking forward
For the UK the read-across is direct and uncomfortable. Britain’s copyright and text-and-data-mining consultation remains unresolved, leaving rights holders in exactly the position Japan is now addressing. The EU has moved first on watermarking, with UK firms inheriting those rules through market reach rather than domestic legislation. Japan is a G7 economy choosing transparency-by-default over enforcement, and it now has something concrete on the table while Westminster does not. Recent reports of secondhand booksellers fielding bulk orders from opaque buyers are a reminder of what the absence of disclosure looks like from the other end.