Shuntaro Furukawa

Shuntaro Furukawa (born 1972) joined Nintendo in 1994 and rose through its finance and corporate-planning ranks to become the company’s sixth president in June 2018, steering the Switch era and the launch of its successor. He is the numbers-minded counterpart to Nintendo’s creative old guard — and the executive who has drawn the industry’s clearest line on generative AI.

The company that said no

At the company’s annual shareholder meeting in July 2024, Furukawa was asked about generative AI. He noted that game development has used AI-like techniques for enemy behavior for decades, and acknowledged the new tools “can be used in creative ways” — before delivering the caveat heard around the industry: they raise intellectual-property problems, and Nintendo’s value comes from decades of human craft that “cannot be created by technology alone.” Press worldwide summarized it as Nintendo declining to use generative AI in its first-party games, a stance that set it apart as rivals raced to adopt the tools.

Nintendo has paired the abstention with enforcement. The company — famously litigious about its characters, as in its 2024 patent suit over Palworld — has said it will take necessary action against generative-AI works that infringe its intellectual property. Furukawa’s framing is notably corporate rather than moral: it is about protecting Nintendo IP and the distinctiveness of its games, not a philosophical rejection of the technology, and he has left the door open to “technological developments” elsewhere in the business.