Kakao has won a government-led artificial intelligence (AI) platform project and is moving to expand its ecosystem.

Kakao said on Wednesday it was selected to carry out the AI Agent Marketplace Development Support Project, overseen by the Ministry of Science and ICT and managed by the National Information Society Agency (NIA).

The project will run through December 2027 in a consortium with Kakao Enterprise. The total project size is about 11 billion won, including government funding and private contributions.

The planned marketplace will integrate registration, verification, search, combination, execution and settlement for AI agents on a single platform. Kakao plans a first opening within this year, followed by a second upgrade in 2027 that includes agent studio functions.

The platform will be designed as an open structure not tied to a specific cloud or AI model. It will support connections to external AI models, application programming interfaces (APIs) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), in addition to Kakao's own model, Kanana. To ensure reliability, it will go through multi-stage reviews including security checks, sandbox verification and hallucination control, and will operate an always-on re-verification system.

In the process, Kakao will provide operational know-how from existing services such as PlayMCP, AI Agent Builder and AI National Secretary, while Kakao Enterprise plans to take charge of cloud infrastructure and security. It also plans to run support programmes such as an AI agent challenge and hackathons to identify strong agents and help them join the marketplace, building a virtuous-cycle ecosystem.

Kim Se-woong (김세웅), Kakao's AI synergy performance leader, said, "We will create a standard for an AI agent ecosystem that anyone can trust and operate it as a sustainable marketplace."