Nintendo Reportedly Lobbying Japanese Government to Push Back Against Gen AI (twistedvoxel.com)

Nintendo is reportedly lobbying the Japanese government to push back against generative AI, according to a post from lawmaker Satoshi Asano who’s soliciting public input on AI issues. Asano acknowledged generative AI’s convenience but flagged rising risks to creators’ rights, citing high-profile lawsuits—like Yomiuri Shimbun’s 2025 claim for ¥2.17 billion against Perplexity AI, suits by Nikkei and Asahi, The New York Times vs. OpenAI, and Getty Images vs. Stability AI. The government is already responding: METI published a “Generative AI Utilization Guidebook for Content Creation” urging firms to check whether AI outputs closely resemble copyrighted works, and some companies (e.g., DeNA) are training models exclusively on proprietary datasets. Nintendo is said to be avoiding generative AI use and pressing policymakers for stronger protections. For the AI/ML community this signals potential tightening of legal and operational constraints around training data and model outputs. Possible implications include stricter provenance and auditing requirements for datasets, wider adoption of licensed or synthetic corpora, and increased compliance costs—especially for startups and open-source projects relying on web-scale scraping. Policy moves driven by major IP holders like Nintendo could push research toward defensible data curation, watermarks or detectability methods, and clearer liability frameworks for model providers and downstream users. The balance struck in Japan may influence global norms on IP, model training practices, and what counts as “ethical” generative AI.