SK Telecom (017670) and NAVER (035420) are competing for a government project to develop an artificial intelligence foundation model specialized in cybersecurity. As AI has advanced to the point of scanning for vulnerabilities and even writing attack code, technology capable of defending against such capabilities is expected to determine the winner.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said on the 26th that an SK Telecom consortium and a NAVER Cloud consortium had applied to the call for proposals for the cybersecurity-specialized AI foundation model development project, run by the ministry and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA).
The project gained momentum after Anthropic of the United States unveiled Claude Mithos Preview in April this year. Mithos identified previously unknown vulnerabilities, known as zero-days, on its own and in some cases developed code that could be used in actual attacks.
SK Telecom formed a consortium with SK Shieldus, AhnLab (053800), Upstage and Raonsecure (042510). The company is now bidding in the security field after clearing the second-stage evaluation in the government's project to build homegrown AI foundation models. The consortium plans to develop a family of AI foundation models specialized in cybersecurity across the board and to demonstrate agentic security services based on domestic cyber threat conditions.
The NAVER consortium includes LG Uplus, LG CNS, LG AI Research, ESTsecurity and Logpresso. They aim to develop an AI foundation model that would internalize national cybersecurity capabilities. LG had initially considered forming its own consortium but ultimately decided to join the NAVER group after concluding that NAVER's ecosystem could accelerate the commercialization of its AI technology, sources said.
The ministry plans to review the eligibility of the submitted documents and then hold presentation evaluations involving outside experts. The results are expected to be announced in early September.
