The watchdog noted the need to balance privacy concerns with the potential benefits of generative AI, including its potential to accelerate innovation and deal with problems such as climate change.

Japan is the third-largest source of traffic to OpenAI's website, according to analytics firm Similarweb.

The EU is working on the first set of rules to govern AI, while regulators in other countries are also scrambling to draw up rules.

Italian regulator Garante had ChatGPT taken offline before the company agreed to install age verification features and let European users block their information from being used to train the system.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in April to discuss expansion in Japan.