Japan now hunting down illegal anime & manga pirates with AI?
You might already know Japan is fighting back against those shady sites offering illicit manga and anime and they’re bringing AI into the ring. In fact, the country is rolling out a new plan to track down piracy online, using smart machines so humans don’t have to play “Where did that scanlation go?!” all day.
In late 2024, the Agency for Cultural Affairs (文化庁) in Japan proposed a pilot scheme to combat illegal manga and anime distribution using artificial intelligence. Under this plan, the system would scan the web images, text, website layouts to identify sites offering unauthorized manga or anime. Why? Because there are thousands of piracy sites (some estimates say at least 1,000) offering Japanese content for free and human moderators alone can’t keep up. To start, the government allocated about ¥300 million (roughly $2 million) under the supplementary budget for this pilot.
Manga and anime aren’t small-time hobbies in Japan: they are a huge cultural export, and part of a larger strategy under the government’s Cool Japan initiative. For instance, in 2021 the global sales of Japanese content (games, anime, manga, etc.) reportedly hit about ¥4.7 trillion, a figure comparable to traditional industries like steel or semiconductors. Because of that anime publishers are taking strict act to defend their work for example, The official Jujutsu Kaisen account warned that the illegal recording or uploading of its new film could lead to fines of up to 10 million yen, roughly $65,000, and potential prison time.
Even with AI, things get complicated. According to recent reporting, illegal distribution remains a massive problem: some estimates put the yearly damage from online piracy at trillions of yen.
Moreover, many pirate sites operate outside Japan — in jurisdictions where enforcement is weak or non-existent. That complicates takedown efforts, even if AI successfully identifies the site.
Finally, AI detection can generate false positives (innocent sites incorrectly flagged) or miss cleverly disguised piracy sites. As one critic put it: until AI becomes smarter than the pirates rewriting their sites every other day, this will remain a cat-and-mouse game.
Image credit MAPPA, Sunrise, Production I.G.
