By the end of this year, every resident of South Korea will have free and unmetered access to a general-purpose AI chatbot and a public service agent built on domestic models. The initiative, dubbed "AI for All," is the most ambitious industrial policy bet Seoul has made in a generation, and it carries profound implications for the country's economy, labor market, and national security.
President Lee Jae-myung unveiled the plan at the San Francisco AI Summit in July, framing it as part of a vision to transform South Korea into an AI powerhouse second only to the United States and China. His strategy rests on three pillars: making Korea an irreplaceable node in the AI supply chain through its dominance in memory chips, becoming a testbed that adopts AI faster and more broadly than any other country, and spreading AI's benefits across society.
In what he called the "San Francisco AI Declaration," Lee said South Korea would show the world how to integrate AI across industries and daily life, grounded in human-centered values. The vehicle would be "AI for All": AI access for every citizen, adoption across government services, and a second growth engine—in AI models, applications, and robotics—alongside the chips of Samsung and SK Hynix.
A sovereign AI bet
Lee has backed a handful of domestic consortia to build a sovereign Korean model, and during the summit, the presidential office announced semiconductor supply and production partnerships between US and South Korean firms worth a combined US$950 billion over five years. South Korea is also building AI data center capacity in the multiple-gigawatt range.
But the centerpiece is the promise to offer general-purpose AI chatbots and public service agents, with no usage limits, to all 51 million residents. Lee is betting on AI the way past presidents bet on shipbuilding, chips, and cars. If it works, Korea will join the United States and China as one of the handful of countries in control of their AI destiny, with homegrown models for a technology that will shape its economy, labor market, and national security.
Alongside this bet, South Korea has also legislated ahead of its peers. The National Assembly passed the AI Basic Act in December 2024, which took full effect in January 2026, making South Korea the first country in the world with a comprehensive AI law fully in force. The country established an AI Safety Institute (AISI), and the legislation sets a compute threshold that designates high-performance systems for additional safety duties and imposes risk management obligations across ten "high-impact" domains, including energy, healthcare, hiring, public services, and nuclear operations.
The European Union, whose 2024 AI Act was the first comprehensive AI law adopted worldwide, has since deferred its high-risk obligations until December 2027. The United States has no horizontal AI law at all. Measured by what is actually in force, South Korea leads, and it is developing a policy approach that could demonstrate how AI prosperity and safety can be built together.
Access is only the beginning
The bet on "AI for All" is about more than access to AI models and personal agents. Access is the part a government can deliver by decision—select the operators, supply the graphics processing units (GPUs), and open the service. Whether people gain from AI is decided elsewhere, in what the technology does to their work and the decisions made on their behalf.
The same ideas are being raised in the United States. In an August 2026 essay, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that the central risk in AI is the concentration of control, and that the answer is a capable personal agent in the hands of everyone rather than a system that automates people out of work. South Korea has reached a similar conclusion by a different route and has acted on it through public policy.
Both approaches rely on the assumption that providing widespread access to the technology is key to distributing the benefits of AI. With this in mind, the more the United States and Korea, including their companies, cooperate and coordinate to expand AI access, the greater the benefits that will be shared across both nations. This argument only holds if AI is developed responsibly and safely, which includes world-class AI evaluation capacity and research.
Currently, the evaluation capacity of AI technologies sits with the Korea Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI). It represents the country in the International Network of AI Safety Institutes, leads a safety consortium of some two dozen industry and academic bodies, and runs a dual-use task force on chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear risk.
AISI's mission and mandate are critical, and questions about its resourcing are now being debated. The 2027 budget, approved by the presidential cabinet on September 1, raises the Ministry of Science and ICT's AI spending by 84 percent to $6.3 billion (KRW 9.4 trillion) and doubles the line for AI safety technology development to $10 million (KRW 15.2 billion).
The National Assembly decides whether that ratio matches the program it is meant to protect. More political and financial capital invested in AISI, and closer coordination between AISI and US-based safety institutes and incubators, would augment and accelerate Korea's strong legislative move toward global leadership in safety practice.
Alongside AISI, Korea could emulate the safety and research centers now attracting significant investment elsewhere by establishing a research hub of its own, enabling Korea to develop and disseminate world-leading expertise on economic disruption, alignment, and other risks that AI creates or exacerbates. The foundations already exist. Seoul's city government, in conjunction with strategic autonomy efforts, has begun piloting AI services in public administration, and the national government is working with regional partners to share best practices.
South Korea's move is a bold experiment that could redefine how nations approach AI governance. Whether it succeeds will depend not only on the technology itself but on the institutions built to evaluate and safeguard it. As the world watches, Seoul is betting that it can have both prosperity and safety—and that the rest of the world will follow its lead.
