Artificial Analysis: South Korea 🇰🇷 is now the clear #3 nation in AI — powered by the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative there are now multiple Korean AI labs with near frontier intelligence.

[https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2014786516153991339](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2014786516153991339) A key driver of this momentum is the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative, a government-backed, nationwide competition that incentivizes domestic model development through a multi-stage elimination process. The initiative shortlists national champions, with winners receiving direct government funding and guaranteed access to large-scale GPU capacity. ➤ In August 2025, five organizations were selected: Naver, SK Telecom, LG Group, Upstage, and NC AI ➤ In the most recent round announced last week, the field narrowed to three: LG, SK Telecom, and Upstage. ➤ A fourth finalist is expected to be selected in the coming months as the evaluation process continues Generally, top Korean AI models tend to be open weights, and vary in size ranging from Motif‘s 12.7B Thinking model to LG’s 236B K-EXAONE. Other models, such as Korea Telecom (KT)’s Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro, are proprietary and developed with a focus on business integration with existing KT clients. Overview of major releases: **➤ LG | K-EXAONE -** The current leader in the Korean AI race and a shortlisted model in the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative. K-EXAONE is a 236B open weights model and scores 32 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. K-EXAONE performs strongly across various intelligence evaluations from scientific reasoning, instruction following, to agentic coding. However, this model has high verbosity, using 100 million tokens to run the Artificial Analysis evaluation suite **➤ Upstage | Solar Open -** Another shortlisted model in the Korean National Sovereign AI Initiative. Solar Open is a 100B open-weights model and scores 21 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Solar Open performs well in instruction following and has lower hallucination rate compared to peer Korean models **➤ Naver | HyperCLOVA X SEED Think -** A 32B open weights reasoning model that scores 24 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. HyperCLOVA X SEED Think demonstrates strong performance on agentic tool-use workflows and scores highly in the Global MMLU Lite multilingual index for Korean, highlighting its potential usefulness in a primarily Korean language environment **➤ Korea Telecom | Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro -** A proprietary reasoning model that scores 23 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro sees strong performance in agentic tool-use. Mi:dm K 2.5 Pro currently has no publicly available endpoint. Instead, Korea Telecom primarily intends to package this model into product offerings and use this model to serve KT’s clients **➤ Motif | Motif-2-12.7B -** A small open weights model that scores 24 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Motif-2-12.7B performs well in long-context reasoning and knowledge, but is highly token intensive - using 120 million tokens to run the Artificial Analysis evaluation suite