The government will strengthen research and development on artificial intelligence and digital standards and step up forum activities to support efforts to secure leadership in global markets. It will also select new related forums to speed up support for standards development.

The Ministry of Science and ICT said on Tuesday it is working with the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) and the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) to strengthen companies' capabilities to standardise core technologies.

The ministry said it has steadily worked to enhance companies' standardisation capabilities and national competitiveness by leading international standards. The Information and Communications Broadcasting Standards Development Support programme, launched in 1997, supported a total of 898 companies and institutions in 2025 alone, including 706 from industry, 75 from academia and 117 from the research sector. As a result, 193 international standards and 32 domestic standards were established.

The establishment of standards led to commercialisation, generating results including 72 products and services and 79.9 billion won in sales. It also said a cumulative 388 domestic experts advanced to chair-level roles at international standards bodies such as the ITU and ISO/IEC JTC 1, contributing to building networks to lead international standard-setting agendas.

This year, it will expand investment to foster AI standards, as artificial intelligence transformation has become a key agenda driving innovation across areas including the public and industrial sectors. It will support standards development in 10 fields, including physical AI, interoperability between AI agents, graphics processing unit linkage and optimisation, and AI-ready data.

It will also provide additional support for 7 new forums, including physical AI, AI safety and trust, and cloud-based AI agent services, to spread standards led by the private sector and strengthen the ecosystem foundation.

Lee Do-gyu (이도규), head of the Information and Communications Policy Office at the ministry, said it will continue to actively support standardisation across all digital fields, including AI, to firmly back Korean companies' overseas expansion.