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We commented earlier this year about how Amazon is making waves in the anime streaming industry. They’ve gotten multiple big series, like New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, along with the highly underrated City anime. However, their latest move, releasing anime dubbed by AI, might have gotten them into hot water with Japanese license holders like Kadokawa, Sentai Filmworks, and Aniplex.

Fans noticed that a handful of shows had new dubs on Prime Video. Banana Fish, No Game No Life Zero, and Pet suddenly had new dubs in English and Latin American Spanish, but there was a catch – the dubs were listed as “AI beta” dubs. None of these shows are new; Banana Fish came out in 2018, for example, so the decision to upload new dubs was surprising. Not just to fans, but to the companies that own the anime that Amazon is streaming.

Kadokawa and Sentai Filmworks own the rights to No Game, No Life Zero, the prequel film to the anime. According to Anime News Network, Kadokawa has not approved an AI dub of the movie “in any form.” Meanwhile, Sentai Filmworks was “not aware in advance” of the AI dub and is currently “looking into it with Amazon.”

All the AI beta dubs that we’ve listed above have since been removed from Prime Video, suggesting that Amazon has been told by their anime partners that this isn’t acceptable. For context, Japanese companies are notoriously protective of their intellectual property and extremely slow to warm up to new partners, which is why we’ve never had that live-action Akira movie we’ve heard about for years. If they didn’t authorize a new dub of No Game, No Life Zero – AI or otherwise – then this could have consequences for Amazon’s ambitions in the anime industry.

If we had to guess what happened, we’d say that Prime Video was experimenting with the use of GenAI to dub anime and never meant for these dubs to actually be visible to the public. It is hard to believe that a company as large and well-funded as Amazon would risk its relationship with Japanese rights holders in a valuable growth area for them just to produce a couple of AI dubs of years-old shows. But, unless something else becomes public, we’ll probably never know for sure what happened.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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