South Korea making its own security-centric AI model

South Korea is developing its own security-focused AI model and hopes to bring it online by the end of the year, to ensure the nation has sovereign bug-finding capabilities. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon revealed the effort to create the model yesterday, and said it’s needed so South Korea possesses a bug-finding model to rival Anthropic’s Mythos. The US government has twice blocked access to Mythos, once by requiring Anthropic to offer it only to American citizens – a demand the AI company could not meet and therefore blocked all access – and a second time by ordering the company to take down its services so Washington could investigate allegations of possible dangerous performance problems. Those incidents led many other nations conclude that the US could in future deny access to powerful models – meaning US-based organizations and national security agencies would have an edge. Washington has since allowed limited access to Mythos to some of its allies. Interest in developing sovereign AI capacity has nonetheless soared, and Bae said South Korea now aspires to develop its own Mythos-class model. The Register is aware of another effort to create Mythos-like tools, involving private firms and infrastructure operators across several countries. In South Korea, the government’s approach is to add security-related information to the corpus it is using to train a locally developed frontier model. The minister said he expects that security-capable model will debut by the end of 2026. South Korea has also sought bids to create a chatbot that will be made freely available to all residents, plus an agentic application that will help locals interact with government services. Minister Bae made his remarks at a policy briefing session conducted by President Lee Jae Myung, during which discussions about AI also touched on using the technology to detect fake news in real time, and put it to work handling complaints about government services more quickly than is currently possible. ®