South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency, or KOCCA, will invest a record R&D budget this year to support convergence of content and artificial intelligence (AI).

On Jan. 19, KOCCA said it will push ahead in earnest with the 2026 Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism R&D programme. This year's R&D budget is set at 149.9 billion won, up about 45.4 billion won from a year earlier. New R&D spending alone totals a record 69.2 billion won.

The programme will be centred on the K-Culture AI Oxygen Supply Project. It set four priority directions, including industrial AX and sovereign AI public AX and training advanced talent. This year it also added projects including AI conversion of cultural spaces and joint growth for large, mid-sized and small firms linked to a culture and arts large language model (LLM).

The first call will recruit 52 new projects worth about 58.1 billion won. By field, it will invest about 54.3 billion won in the culture, arts and content segment to support 61 projects. These include cooperative, joint-growth R&D for large, mid-sized and small firms and AI conversion of public cultural facilities.

It will allocate about 4.6 billion won to the copyright segment and select 7 projects, including leading copyright technology development. It also added tasks to support verification and commercialisation of copyright technology.

The sports and tourism segments will be announced separately later. The sports segment will provide about 6.5 billion won for around 12 tasks, including technology development that uses personal exercise records, while the tourism segment will invest about 3.8 billion won in around 6 tasks, including AI-based tourism innovation technology development.

Myungha Kim, head of the Culture, Sports and Tourism Technology Promotion Center, said, "As a result of continued efforts together with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to expand the scale of cultural technology R&D to match the status of K-culture and the level of cultural finances, the scale of support was able to increase significantly from a year earlier." He said, "Since AI-centred cultural technology R&D is a source of national competitiveness, we will firmly build a support system that can contribute to improving the quality of life for the public and to industrial growth."

KOCCA will hold a briefing on Jan. 23 at the Hongneung Talent Campus. Applications will be accepted until Feb. 12, and some programmes will have follow-up calls in the first quarter.