Ha Jung-woo (하정우), vice chairman of the National AI Strategy Committee, said South Korea must build the capability to develop and operate frontier AI on its own, beyond creating a standalone foundation model. He said the country should unite top domestic capabilities rather than rely on firm-by-firm competition to narrow gaps with the United States and China. He also urged steps to reduce dependence on U.S. and Chinese technology and highlighted data use, data centre permits and supply chain stability as urgent issues. He largely avoided questions about his political future.

SK Telecom has passed a second-stage evaluation of the government’s project for a proprietary AI foundation model. The assessment reflected industrial applicability and impact on South Korea’s AI ecosystem. SKT plans to expand its technology scope in the next evaluation to models with up to trillion-level parameters and to multimodal and AI agent areas. It has developed the A.X K1 and expanded to A.X K2, and it is building derived vision and speech models and applying them in manufacturing and defence.