Daiwa Securities Group has joined other major Japanese financial firms in embracing artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, moving in the opposite direction from Wall Street banks.

Japan¡¯s second-biggest brokerage plans to adopt the ChatGPT technology from this month for all of its 9,000 domestic employees, the company said in a statement Tuesday, adding that it has ¡°limitless potential.¡±

The development follows a Nikkei report that Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group will begin using a chatbot for work such as drafting approval requests and responding to internal inquiries. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group has begun trials on an AI chatbot developed in partnership with Microsoft Japan, the newspaper said, while Mizuho Financial Group also plans an AI tool for internal use.

Daiwa said ChatGPT can help employees gather information in English in addition to saving time and cutting the costs of creating documents. ¡°We decided that the most beneficial step would be for us to quickly, widely apply the technology to explore new ways to use it,¡± the firm said in the statement.

Wall Street firms are clamping down on ChatGPT. Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo & Co. are among lenders that have banned usage of the new tool, Bloomberg reported in February.

Sam Altman, the co-founder and chief executive officer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo earlier this month to discuss the technology¡¯s potential and how to mitigate the downsides.

Japan is using ChatGPT to try and make its often opaque and complex government regulations easier to understand.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is now trying out the chatbot to simplify official documents and make them more accessible, agriculture minister Tetsuro Nomura said. It¡¯s the first time that a branch of Japan¡¯s central government has publicly said it is testing out OpenAI¡¯s artificial intelligence.

¡°We are not doing anything big with this,¡± Nomura told reporters during a regular news conference Tuesday, adding that the chatbot would handle only publicly available information. ¡°There is always the danger of classified information leaking.¡±

The ministry plans to use the chatbot to update online manuals on how to fill out applications for subsidies and other public support, the Asahi Shimbun reported earlier. Thousands of pages in regulatory changes are made every year, and the ministry now outsources the labor-intensive task of updating its homepage, the newspaper said.

ChatGPT debuted in Japan¡¯s parliamentary debates when an opposition lawmaker used the chatbot to draft questions to the prime minister.