SK Telecom, LG AI Research and Upstage have passed the second-stage evaluation of the government’s sovereign AI project and advanced to the next round, the Ministry of Science and ICT and NIPA said on Aug. 18. Motif Technologies, which joined through an additional call, did not advance. The ministry said it assessed teams using benchmark, expert and user scores, adding a public-use evaluation process.

SK Telecom said its A.X K2, developed for a government-led sovereign foundation model project, posted strong results on math-reasoning benchmarks. The company said the model scored 29 out of 42 on the IMO 2026 evaluation, meeting this year’s gold medal cutoff, and tied for the top score on the MathArena AIME 2026 leaderboard with 97.1 percent accuracy. It also said A.X K2 achieved a perfect score in the KMO 2026 second round.