Masaaki Taira on AI, Stablecoins, and Japan's Policy

Halfway through his address at Tech for Impact Summit 2026, Masaaki Taira, Member of the House of Representatives, former Minister for Digital Affairs, and the founder of more LDP technology Project Teams than any other sitting legislator, paused on a word.

“AI can’t have a bank account,” he said. “So it’s stablecoins. Possibly crypto, too.”

Then, with a half-smile at the English speakers in the audience: “Fu ni ochita. I don’t know how you say it in English. But it clicked.”

He said it on the Main Stage in Tokyo on April 26. Around that sentence, Taira set out a policy calendar, a new LDP Project Team, and a cybersecurity program, all of which bear on where AI, Web3, and cybersecurity capital and talent land in Japan over the next eighteen months.

A Briefing for People Who Don’t Read Government Strategy Documents

Taira opened with a line about agriculture.

“It’s a bit like agriculture, in a way. Policy has a one-year calendar.”

The calendar, in his telling, goes like this. February and March are when ideas get seeded inside the ruling LDP’s Project Teams and working groups. By April, ministries and divisions have shaped them into proposals. The LDP’s growth strategy is finalized around the end of May. Two or three weeks after that, the Japanese government publishes those same priorities as the official Growth Strategy and Honebuto, the “Big-Bone Policy” that anchors fiscal and regulatory decisions for the rest of the year.

He was blunt about what that means for investors and founders.

“If you only start reading once the government strategy is out, no matter how hard you read it, you’ll be in the same boat as everyone else,” Taira said. “Right now, at this very moment, the proposals coming out of the various LDP committees are what you should be paying attention to.”

The white papers being drafted in April are roughly six weeks from becoming national policy.

“When I Create a Project Team, It Almost Always Becomes National Policy”

To explain why his reading of that calendar carries weight, Taira walked the audience through his own record.

• 2022 — Web3 / Blockchain PT. Output became the foundation of Japan’s stablecoin regulation and the first wave of crypto tax reform.
• 2023 — AI PT. Multiple white papers; outputs fed into Japan’s response to generative AI.
• 2024 — Cybersecurity and Fusion Energy PTs. Recommendations became core to Japan’s active cyber defense legislation and to the fusion R&D programs supporting Kyoto Fusioneering and peers.
• 2025 — In cabinet as Minister for Digital Affairs and the first Minister for Cyber Security. No PT that year.
• 2026 — AI On-Chain Finance Initiative PT. Just stood up. Acting chair: Taira. Chair: Seiji Kihara (formerly Ministry of Finance). Secretary-General: Hideki Murai (also formerly Ministry of Finance).

“When I create a Project Team, it almost always becomes national policy,” he said.

The 2026 PT is the one to watch. The ruling party of Japan has launched a body with the words “On-Chain” in its title.

Japan’s Version of Project Glasswing

Before the on-chain finance pitch, Taira opened with cybersecurity, and with one incident he is using as the wedge.

The Anthropic threat report, Anthropic’s recently published documentation of state-aligned actors weaponizing AI for cyber operations, has set off a regulatory response in Washington. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has convened tech companies and financial institutions in what has been reported as Project Glasswing, a Treasury-led standing forum to triage AI-enabled cyber risk to the US financial system.

Taira’s response, ten days old at the time of the talk, is to import the structure.

A Japanese version of Project Glasswing has been stood up under the Financial Services Agency, led by Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama. The FSA convened the Bank of Japan, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and Japan’s three megabanks the week before the summit. The press conference announcing the program followed.

Taira is already pushing past finance. The expanded version puts the National Cybersecurity Office (NCO, established under his tenure as the first Cyber Security Minister) at the head, with the AI Safety Institute (AISI, Asia’s first, established two years ago under then-minister and now Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi) alongside, plus METI for power and grid and MLIT for transport. It covers all critical infrastructure. The foreign frontier-model providers Taira named as participating partners: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and “possibly Microsoft.”

“As a country, we’ll start with vulnerability assessments, prioritize, and patch them in order. That’s how we want to proceed.”

It is the most detailed public account so far of how Japan plans to run cooperation between its cyber agencies, the FSA, and the four largest US frontier-model labs. Anyone weighing Tokyo against Singapore, Seoul, and London as a base for AI-finance work now has Project Glasswing JP on the list.

Why AI and Blockchain “Snapped Together” at Davos

The on-chain finance thesis, Taira said, crystallized for him at Davos in early 2025.

“Until then, blockchain policy and AI policy were running in parallel, separately. A year ago, those two snapped together for me. And the area where the most outcome, the most value, gets created, I’m convinced, is finance.”

His logic runs through agency. As AI moves into autonomous agents (Sota Watanabe had made the same argument the day before on the same stage; see the Web4 panel recap), agents will need to transact and settle. Under existing law in any major economy, they cannot hold a bank account.

So, in Taira’s framing, they use stablecoins. Possibly crypto. Either way, on-chain.

Hence the AI On-Chain Finance Initiative Project Team. By the end of May, after Golden Week, the PT will publish its recommendations: what new legislation Japan needs, what can be done through regulatory adjustments inside existing statutes, and where supervisory guidance from the FSA can move the system without new law at all.

Founders and investors building agentic-AI products that need to settle in yen or on yen-denominated stablecoins should read the recommendations the week they drop. They go into the LDP growth strategy by end of May and into the government’s Honebuto by mid-June.

The AI White Paper and the “Most AI-Friendly Country” Vision

Taira closed with the AI White Paper, released the week before the summit and, in his words, “still in draft, but I’m confident it will become national policy almost as written.”

The headline items:

• Agentic AI policy. The first white paper handled GPU capacity and Japanese/English hallucination problems. The new one is built for autonomous AI agents.
• AI × Robotics. Roughly one trillion yen of public-private investment to build a Japanese physical-AI foundation model, using data Japanese industrial companies hold that has never been published on the internet.
• Vertical AI. Domain-specific, high-expertise AI as a national priority. The case: that same private industrial data cannot be copied by horizontal models trained on the open web.
• AI for Education, AI for Defense, and adjacent domains also covered.

The frame he returned to in closing has been his line for three years: Japan should be the world’s most AI-friendly country, a place where AI can learn easily and be implemented easily, with a regulatory regime that lets the technology get deployed.

“AI-related investment and talent are already gathering in Japan. The most politically stable G7 country right now is ours, so please bring your investment and your talent to Japan.”

What This Means for T4IS 2027

AI and on-chain finance is, in Japan, the subject of an active LDP Project Team that will hand its recommendations to a Finance Ministry-led implementation track inside six weeks. The next Tech for Impact Summit, May 18–19 in Tokyo, will sit on the same ground.

The people who will operate inside that new perimeter include regulators like Taira, the cyber teams responding to the next Anthropic threat report, founders shipping AI-agent products that settle on-chain, and the institutional capital funding them. T4IS 2027 is where they meet.

For those operating somewhere on that map who want a seat as 2027 takes shape, the T4IS 2027 membership tiers describe how the gathering is structured. Senior executives can reach the organizers via the application page on this site, or search Tech for Impact Summit. The PT’s recommendations are due by the end of May; the summit is a year out.

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Masaaki Taira is a Member of the House of Representatives, former Minister for Digital Affairs, and the first Minister for Cyber Security of Japan. He chairs the LDP’s National Cybersecurity Strategy HQ, the AI & Web3 Subcommittee, and serves as Acting Chair of the Next-Generation AI & On-Chain Finance Task Force. See Taira’s speaker page and his pre-summit briefing on AI, Blockchain, and Japan’s Strategy for the longer arc.