South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said on Sunday that domestically developed artificial intelligence models are spreading into high-risk, high-difficulty professional settings. It said applications are expanding to cancer treatment design, autonomous welding in shipbuilding, defence and semiconductor design.

LG AI Research is working with Vanderbilt University Medical Center to develop an "agentic AI for cancer" that supports the full process from analysing cancer tissue to designing treatment plans. It will build a multi-agent collaboration architecture based on its large language model EXAONE and an AI specialised in cancer pathology.

Each agent will be responsible for tasks including analysing cancer tissue images, checking cancer gene location and activation information, verifying responses to candidate drugs, designing treatment strategies and supporting clinicians' final judgement. The plan is to improve treatment outcomes in clinical settings through a collaboration system in which AI rapidly processes vast medical data and clinicians make the final professional decisions.

NC AI will introduce physical AI technology at Hanwha Ocean's shipbuilding sites. Using data accumulated at Hanwha Ocean's Smart Yard, an AI and IoT-based digital production centre, it will build an autonomous welding system that predicts welding quality and optimises working conditions on its own. With a break in skills transfer emerging as an issue in shipbuilding due to the ageing of skilled workers, NC AI aims to turn master-level skills into AI assets and pass them on to the next generation. The company said it expects the system, once applied, to improve both uniform quality and workplace safety.

Park Sun-young (박선영), a researcher on NC AI's multimodal AI team, said, "To pass on to the next generation the instincts and experience that disappear each time a master leaves the field, we will turn them into assets with K-AI and further solidify South Korea's No. 1 position in the global shipbuilding industry."

SKT is joining hands with the defence ministry to develop a defence-focused AI model. It will pursue development and demonstration based on its proprietary AI foundation model A.X K1. The two organisations signed a memorandum of understanding in May after a defence AI transformation policy meeting in January involving the science ministry, the defence ministry and the National AI Strategy Committee. They plan to lay the groundwork to accelerate defence AI transformation by developing specialised models using reliable defence data.

Motif Technologies is working with South Korean semiconductor design company FADU to apply its proprietary AI model step by step across the entire semiconductor development cycle. It will cover areas from circuit design to verification, placement and routing optimisation, and power-efficiency improvements. Through this, FADU plans to continue expanding industrial applications of a homegrown AI model based on technological capabilities proven in the global market.