South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said on Aug. 26 that two consortia led by SK Telecom and Naver Cloud, respectively, submitted proposals for a project to develop a cybersecurity-specialised AI foundation model.

The SKT consortium proposed as its task the development of an all-round cybersecurity-specialised AI foundation model suite and verification of agentic security services based on the domestic cyber threat environment.

The consortium includes 13 organisations: Upstage, SK Shieldus, Secui, AhnLab, Igloo Corporation, RaonSecure, Smart M2M, AIM Intelligence, Genians, Pionlink, the Korea Information Security Industry Association, the Korea University Industry-Academia Cooperation Foundation and the Soongsil University Industry-Academia Cooperation Foundation.

The Naver Cloud consortium proposed developing an AI foundation model to internalise national cybersecurity capabilities.

A total of 32 organisations are participating, including LG CNS, the LG AI Research Institute and LG Uplus, as well as security and AI companies Logpresso, MarkAny, Sands Lab, Sparrow, S2W, Aispera, ESTsecurity, Jiransecurity, Trillion Labs and Theori Korea. Participants also include Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, KEPCO KDN, the Financial Security Institute, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and Seoul National University, KAIST and POSTECH.

The ministry plans to announce the results of selecting the participating team in early September after reviewing the suitability of submitted documents and holding presentation evaluations by external experts.