The Korean government is launching an effort to develop an independent AI foundation model specialized in detecting and responding to cyber threats, drawing on domestic artificial intelligence (AI) and security technologies.
The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) said on the 23rd that it will accept applications until the 21st of next month, together with the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), for teams to participate in the "Cybersecurity-Specialized AI Foundation Model Development" project.
The project is being pursued to secure an AI model tailored to Korea's security environment, as cyberattacks grow more sophisticated alongside the advancement of high-performance AI. The government will select one team from among participating teams composed of domestic AI and cybersecurity companies, universities, and research institutions, and provide 256 units (32 nodes) of Nvidia's latest AI accelerator, the "B200," for 10 months.
Participating teams must directly propose development methods for the cybersecurity-specialized AI foundation model, fields for demonstrating services using it, and the number of demonstration services. The government plans to select the recipient through a comprehensive evaluation of technical capabilities, development experience, development goals, marketability, and ripple effects.
Five months after the project begins, an interim performance model will be released and a stage evaluation will be conducted. Based on the evaluation results, the government will decide whether to continue GPU support for the remaining five months. The final results are to be released as open source so that domestic security companies and institutions can make broad use of them.
MSIT is also reviewing plans to spread the model developed through this project across the entire cybersecurity ecosystem and to provide follow-up support to advance the model from 2027.
"This is a project to respond to the rapidly changing AI development environment and cybersecurity paradigm," said Ryu Je-myung, Second Vice Minister of Science and ICT. "By securing a security-specialized AI foundation model optimized for the domestic environment, we will lay the core foundation for an AI-based cybersecurity ecosystem."
