Cognition AI’s Devin Finds Its Fastest Adoption Yet in Japan’s Struggling Legacy Code Market

Cognition AI’s Devin Finds Its Fastest Adoption Yet in Japan’s Struggling Legacy Code Market

7 min read•Jul 4, 2026•
Priya Nair
Priya Nair

Japan has become the most engaged market for Cognition AI’s Devin coding tool, as the country confronts both a shrinking workforce and massive amounts of legacy code that need modernization. The San Francisco startup’s rapid uptake in Japan suggests AI-powered software engineering may find its strongest early use case in aging economies facing demographic decline.

Why Japan Is Devin’s Surprise Fastest-Growing Market

Cognition AI president Russell Kaplan said in early June that Japan was “our first or second most popular country in terms of user engagement overall”—an unexpected leader for a product built in San Francisco by a startup founded in 2023.

The country’s demographics explain the urgency. Japan has the world’s oldest population, with nearly 30% of residents over age 65. The working-age population is projected to decline by over 30% between now and 2060. In 2023, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry estimated the country would face a shortage of 789,000 software engineers by 2030.

Cognition AI Devin interface showing code on a screen

The need is particularly acute for legacy code. When Sapporo’s city government faced a national IT compliance mandate, it needed to modernize over one million lines of old code. Kaplan estimated the work would have normally taken 200 engineering months. Using Devin, Sapporo’s engineers completed it in roughly a quarter of that time.

Cognition opened a Tokyo office in April, making Japan the first stop in its Asian expansion. Singapore will serve as the company’s Asia-Pacific headquarters later this year.

The Devin-Kun Phenomenon: Cultural Acceptance Meets AI

Even before Cognition officially launched in Japan, Devin was already spreading virally through the country’s developer community. Engineers debated online what the correct honorific suffix should be for the AI tool—a telling detail in a culture where language hierarchies carry deep social meaning.

“What the community settled on was Devin-kun,” Kaplan said. The -kun suffix is informal and affectionate, typically used for junior colleagues or close acquaintances. The choice signals that Japanese engineers have embraced the AI as a teammate rather than a threat.

“The needs are real, especially in critical infrastructure and government,” Kaplan said. “The country is running on aging infrastructure with a declining workforce.”

The efficiency gains are magnified by Devin’s multilingual capabilities. Japanese engineers can work with the tool entirely in Japanese while collaborating through the agent with teams on the other side of the world. Kaplan suggested that low English proficiency “has led to a bit more isolation for some businesses in Japan,” and AI’s native multilingualism chips away at that barrier.

Japan’s Bet on U.S. AI Over Sovereign Models

Japan has become the preferred Asian beachhead for American AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic both opened their first international offices in Tokyo. Microsoft, Alphabet, and other hyperscalers have committed billions to Japanese data centers.

Japan was also the second country to secure access to Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, with three of its largest banks—MUFG, Mizuho, and Sumitomo Mitsui—among those granted entry through Project Glasswing, a program to help critical institutions fix security vulnerabilities. (That access was quickly shut off after the U.S. barred all foreigners from using the model in mid-June.)

While South Korea, Singapore, and other regional economies have made sovereign AI a priority, Japan seems more comfortable partnering with U.S. AI labs. One of OpenAI’s biggest investors is SoftBank, the massive Japanese telecom company run by tech booster Masayoshi Son.

“Japan has disproportionately invested in working closely with U.S. companies to influence the roadmaps of those companies to meet local domestic needs,” Kaplan said.

Beyond Japan: Cognition’s Asia-Pacific Expansion

Cognition AI, best known for its AI coding tool Devin, operates the tool as a full software engineering teammate: give it a task, and it codes, debugs, and deploys code autonomously inside the tools an engineering team already uses. Devin was one of the earliest instances of “AI employees” integrated into workplace tools like Slack.

In late May, Cognition raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round that valued the startup at $26 billion, more than doubling its valuation from September 2025. The company’s annualized run rate reached $492 million at the time of the raise, up from just $37 million a year earlier—a 13× increase in roughly twelve months.

One of Cognition’s more unexpected growth markets is Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has become a regional software engineering hub, driven by a large English-speaking talent pool, lower operating costs, and proximity to Southeast Asia. Kaplan described Malaysian engineers as among the most skilled in the world at managing AI agents.

Cognition launched an Applied AI Engineering program in Malaysia that identifies top engineers who excel at directing agents and trains them to teach entire teams how to work effectively with AI. Kaplan is also looking closely at South Korea and Australia as possible expansion markets.

Cognition’s geographically diverse teams also unlock compute efficiency. Kaplan noted that demand for compute at Cognition is doubling roughly every seven weeks. “When people are at work in Japan, people in New York are asleep,” he said. “There’s a lot of efficiency you get as an AI company working that way.”

What This Means for the Industry

For investors: The rapid revenue growth—from $37 million to $492 million annualized run rate in one year—signals that AI coding tools are moving from experimental to mission-critical. The $26 billion valuation suggests investors are betting that AI agents will become core infrastructure for every company that writes software. However, the collapse of Indian IT stocks—Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, and HCLTech all fell between 30% and 40% over the past 12 months—shows that the market is already pricing in disruption to traditional outsourcing models.

For competitors: Cognition’s early lead in Japan creates a moat in a market with unique demographic needs. OpenAI’s Codex and GitHub Copilot are chasing the same use case, but Devin’s full-agent approach—autonomous debugging, deployment, and Slack integration—may prove stickier than chat-based coding assistants. Anthropic and Google’s Gemini are also investing heavily in coding capabilities.

For the broader tech industry: Japan’s adoption of Devin may serve as a template for other aging economies—South Korea, Italy, Germany, parts of China—facing similar demographic and legacy code challenges. If AI coding agents can meaningfully reduce the engineering hours needed to modernize critical infrastructure, governments facing both population decline and digital modernization mandates may become the fastest-growing customer segment for these tools.

Conclusion

Cognition AI’s rapid adoption in Japan is more than a regional success story—it’s a leading indicator for how AI coding agents will penetrate economies facing demographic decline and legacy infrastructure challenges. The $492 million annualized run rate and 30% to 40% declines in Indian IT stocks suggest the market has already grasped what Japan’s engineers discovered first: AI coding tools are moving from curiosity to necessity. As Cognition opens offices across Asia-Pacific, the question is no longer whether AI agents will write software, but how fast the transformation will spread.

According to Fortune, this story was originally featured on Fortune.com.

Arizona appeals court vacates manslaughter sentence after AI video

An Arizona appeals court vacated the 10.5-year sentence of Gabriel Horcasitas while upholding his manslaughter conviction, first reported by Nytimes. The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for resentencing without the video, after judges found that it presented scripted statements as if the victim himself were speaking in court.

The three-judge panel said the video generated a likeness of Christopher Pelkey’s voice and appearance but did not reflect actual events. It found that allowing and relying on the video made the sentencing fundamentally unfair, and noted that no prior Arizona case had addressed the admissibility of such a depiction at sentencing.

The judges said a victim’s right to speak cannot override a defendant’s right to be sentenced on accurate, reliable information. They said the video collapsed the distinction between the family’s belief about what Pelkey would have said and Pelkey’s own voice and opinions.

The ruling distinguishes family members speaking about Pelkey from a generated likeness that appeared to speak for him.

Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, presented the video during Horcasitas’s sentencing alongside victim-impact statements from family and friends. Wales wrote the script and said her husband and the couple’s longtime business partner helped create the video using Pelkey’s voice from a YouTube video and his face and torso from a funeral-service poster.

Judge Todd F. Lang praised the video as genuine, then imposed the maximum sentence of 10.5 years, more than the nine years prosecutors had sought.

Wales said nobody intended to make the court believe Pelkey was alive or that he had recorded the video before his death. She said she disagreed with the ruling and argued that families use slide shows, collages, hypothetical conversations and poetry to convey grief.

Wales compared the AI video with photography, saying it took 15 years of landmark cases around the 1860s before photography was widely accepted in courts.

The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for a new sentencing hearing without the AI-generated video.