Anthropic's Japan entity marked its first anniversary and outlined plans to collaborate with NEC, Hitachi and Fujitsu. It emphasized its role in supporting the expansion of Claude adoption among Japanese companies and educational institutions, as well as the modernization of legacy systems using AI.
Anthropic's Japan entity held a briefing to mark the first anniversary of its establishment, outlining its aim of using AI to support the modernization of outdated systems, a longstanding challenge for Japanese companies. Tojo Hidetoshi (東條 英俊) said it would be “interesting” to combine this with physical AI, including robotics, and connect it to business activity.
The organization grew from approximately 3 people at its establishment to more than 50. The number of domestic companies and organizations adopting Claude also increased more than 10-fold over the past year, although no adoption figures were disclosed. Use in the public and education sectors is progressing. The Digital Agency's in-house development environment, Gennai, began operating in May 2025, and a pilot involving approximately 180,000 employees across all ministries and agencies began in May 2026.
As Japanese companies increasingly partner with systems integrators to adopt AI, Tojo Hidetoshi (東條 英俊) explained the policy of collaborating with major companies such as NEC, Hitachi and Fujitsu. NEC is advancing cotomi, Fujitsu is advancing Takane, and Hitachi is working to apply external language models to customer operations. They will also play a role in proposing Claude to corporate customers.
To promote legacy modernization centered on Claude Code, Anthropic entered into a strategic partnership with NS Solutions. The policy is for AI to support the process from diagnosing existing systems through migration planning and execution, but no specific domestic implementation examples or results on reducing labor hours were presented at this briefing.