Newsletter N°82 - November 2025 

🎬 Media: Japan’s First Copyright-Respecting AI News Search Service

KDDI Corporation (a leading Japanese telecommunications company) in partnership with Google Cloud Japan, will launch an AI-powered article search service in spring 2026 to address the challenges of copyright violations and misinformation often associated with generative AI.

Unlike conventional AI search tools that crawl the entire internet, this service will only use news articles from six participating Japanese media companies—NewsPicks Select (Uzabase), Natalie (Natasha Inc.), Kakaku.com, LDK (Shinyusha), Mansion Note (Renga), and Mamari (Konehito).

Purpose and Motivation
The main objective of this initiative is to tackle copyright violations and misinformation now prevalent in global AI search tools. Unlike typical AI systems that automatically scrape the internet for information, KDDI’s service exclusively indexes articles from a select group of Japanese media companies that join the partnership. Each search result will always display the original source, ensuring that journalists’ and publishers’ rights are respected.​

This model responds directly to legal action taken by leading Japanese newspapers including Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, and Yomiuri Shimbun against US startup Perplexity, which used their articles without permission for AI search functions. The KDDI system aims to prevent such unauthorized use and sets a new ethical standard for AI-powered content discovery.​

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How the Service Works

• KDDI’s AI, built with Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM technology, will generate summaries and answer queries based only on content from officially sanctioned media partners.​

• Users can quickly find high-quality, factual reporting, while knowing every piece of information is attributed to its legal owner.​

• Media companies also benefit directly, earning revenue whenever their content is used in search results, supporting journalism sustainability in the age of generative AI.