Panasonic unit says staff uploaded data on 334,000 people to banned generative AI

Panasonic Operational Excellence said on October 23 that data including personal information of employees, former employees and their family members had been uploaded to an external generative AI service whose use is prohibited, according to ascii.jp.

The data covers about 334,000 people. The company said members of a project with subsidiary Panasonic Digital to introduce a human-resources information system sent the data in violation of internal rules.

The affected records are part of the data registered in the HR system as of April 2026, and include employees of companies in Japan that use the group's shared HR system. For about 75,000 employees and about 178,000 former employees, employee numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses were involved. The former employees left between fiscal 1978 and fiscal 2026, and the group includes people who transferred to a business acquirer.

Family data covers about 55,000 family members of employees and about 26,000 family members of former employees, comprising names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses. Records for former employees' families are limited to those who left in or after 2016.

The company said the project members deleted the AI chat history and the relevant data on their work PCs immediately after the incident was discovered, and that it reported the matter to the Personal Information Protection Commission on September 29. Inquiries to the AI provider confirmed that the feature for using uploaded data in AI training was disabled at the time of upload, so the data would not be used in answers to other users.

Panasonic Operational Excellence said the provider retains data for 30 days from the deletion date for security management and legal compliance even after a chat history is deleted, and that the data will no longer be held within the provider after that period ends, from October 25.