Rakuten AI 3.0 Found to Use DeepSeek V3 as Its Technical Core

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) have run the GENIAC program since 2024, subsidizing the computing power needed to develop domestic generative AI. Rakuten Group was selected for the third phase in July 2025 and began research and development in August. The subsidy awarded to the project was not disclosed, making questions over whether the model was developed independently and how its origins were disclosed important to transparency in the use of public resources.

Rakuten previewed Rakuten AI 3.0 on December 18, 2025, before formally releasing the roughly 700-billion-parameter model on March 17, 2026, free of charge under the Apache 2.0 license. Community members found that its Hugging Face configuration file identified the architecture as DeepSeek V3. Rakuten said on March 19 that it would not disclose the foundation model and argued that the architecture label did not prove that DeepSeek weights had been reused.