Why Japan needs a public scoreboard for robot AI

In 2024, Japan had 450,530 industrial robots in operation, and it installed 44,453 more, the second-largest number of any country. Worldwide, factories installed 542,076 industrial robots that year. China, Japan, the United States, Korea and Germany together took 80 percent of them.

Those figures come from the International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025. They describe machines that are already on factory floors. They do not describe how an AI model will behave when it is asked to move one.

Most published tests of robot AI are in English, and many are run by the companies that built the models. A person giving instructions in Japanese, beside a real arm, has very little public evidence to read. Japan set up its AI Safety Institute in February 2024. A public scoreboard for robots is a different job, and it is the one we are starting.

Genba Bench is the capability test. Anzen Bench is the safety test, in Japanese and in English. Sakura scores 59, the same as Dream-1. The Japanese-versus-English chart is still marked as a sample.

Sources: IFR World Robotics 2025, Executive Summary and IFR, 25 September 2025. Accessed 24 October 2026.