Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said on Monday that if privacy and cybersecurity issues are addressed, Japan will look into government deployment of artificial intelligence technologies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot - a technology developed by Microsoft - Reuters reported on Monday.

Matsuno's words came just before OpenAI chief Sam Altman met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during a visit to Japan when Altman stated that his company is "looking at establishing an office."

When asked about Italy's temporary ban on ChatGPT, Matsuno said Tokyo is aware of other countries' decisions.

Matsuno added that Japan will continue to study implementing AI to lower the workload of government personnel after determining how to respond to issues such as data breaches.

ChatGPT gained popularity after its launch in November 2022, acquiring its first million users in less than a week.

In late January, Microsoft said it would invest "billions of dollars" in OpenAI. Earlier in March, OpenAI introduced a new multimodal AI model, GPT-4, capable of recognizing both text and images, as well as solving complex problems with greater accuracy.

Following the leak of personal data by ChatGPT on March 20, the Italian Data Protection Authority announced that it had restricted the operation of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, over its violations regarding data collection.

On March 25, a data breach caused thousands of users of the intelligence application to be compromised due to a bug that was later identified by OpenAI. About 1.2% of subscribers were affected by the leak, the developer said, highlighting that the figure is "extremely low".

Following the two incidents, UN spokesperson for Secretary-General Stephane Dujarric said UN chief Antonio Guterres called ChatGPT worrying and urged businesses to make careful investments.