South Korea will give every citizen free, unlimited access to AI

South Korea plans to give every citizen free, unlimited access to premium generative AI under a programme it calls "AI for All," Decrypt reported. It would be the first attempt by a national government to treat model access as a public service.

• Three consortia selected Friday to run the service, including South Korea's two largest telecom operators and the company behind Kakao
• Up to 512 Nvidia B200 chips split between the three groups, funded by the government
• Domestic-model quota: at least 50% of queries through a certified Korean foundation model, another 30% through other Korean models
• AI spending for 2026: about $7.2 billion (10 trillion won), three times 2025's commitment
• Beta testing starts in September, full rollout later this year

Each consortium will launch its own app and fold the AI into services people already use: booking doctor's appointments, finding an apartment, getting tax advice. Small businesses get help checking eligibility for state support, and parents receive suggested material for their kids. None of it comes with a token limit.

The government splits its chip allocation and running-cost support between the three groups. The Ministry of Science and ICT has not disclosed what the programme will cost overall.

The real lever is the model quota. Operators must route at least 50% of queries through their own certified Korean foundation model and another 30% through models built by other Korean firms, putting the domestic floor at 80%. Foreign models are allowed only where the ministry considers them necessary, and that usage draws no subsidy. No target has been set for how many people actually use the service.

The goal is sovereign AI: less reliance on systems built in the US or China. The European Commission committed $232 billion (€200 billion) to its InvestAI programme in 2025, including $23 billion (€20 billion) for compute sites meant to cut reliance on non-EU providers. India's IndiaAI Mission put about $1.25 billion behind subsidized GPUs and 20 homegrown model projects. Both are building infrastructure; Seoul is handing citizens the finished product instead. Intokened has covered both sides of that same dependency question this week: Nvidia's bid for Hugging Face, the open-model hub, and Washington's tariff response to China's manufacturing scale.

Adoption today looks thin against that ambition. About two-thirds of South Koreans have tried AI and roughly 23 million use it regularly, but most sit on foreign free tiers: ChatGPT counted 23.45 million Korean users in April, against 8.45 million for Gemini and 2.41 million for Claude. Only about 1.8 million people in the country pay for anything.

The domestic-quota rule exists to change that math: 80% of queries go to Korean-built systems, leaving citizens less reason to pay foreign providers for what the government now gives away free.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.