South Korea’s government has selected the Naver Cloud consortium as the final contractor for its ambitious “cybersecurity-specialized AI foundation model” development project. By beating out the competing SK Telecom consortium for exclusive execution rights, the project to develop “K-Mythos”—a model designed to counter South Korea’s domestic cyber threat landscape—is expected to gain momentum.
The Ministry of Science and ICT announced on the 3rd that it had confirmed the Naver Cloud consortium as the final executing organization for the project. Only two consortia—Naver Cloud and SK Telecom—participated in the open call, and the decision was reached following presentation evaluations conducted on the 2nd.
The evaluation panel consisted of external experts in AI and cybersecurity. They comprehensively assessed each consortium’s project proposal and presentation, examining technical capabilities and development experience, the excellence and feasibility of development strategies and objectives, as well as market potential and ripple effects.
Naver Cloud’s high scores were attributed to its large-scale industry-academia-research consortium composition and its “harness” architecture for controlling and validating multiple AI agents. A Ministry of Science and ICT official explained, “The consortium received high marks for its development strategy and objectives, including the formation of a large-scale industry-academia-research consortium with outstanding technical capabilities and development experience, as well as the multi-agent and harness configuration.”
The consortium brings together 32 companies, institutions, and universities, including LG Group’s core ICT affiliates—LG CNS, LG AI Research, and LG Uplus—alongside security firms S2W, SANDs Lab, and Theori Korea, the Financial Security Institute, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, Seoul National University, and KAIST. The structure combines Naver’s AI technology with LG Group’s capabilities and real-world data from South Korean security companies.
Naver Cloud plans to build a security-specialized model by integrating its experience developing large-scale AI models with malware, vulnerability, and cyber threat intelligence (CTI) data held by security firms, as well as actual attack and defense data. Development will also proceed in parallel on models usable in closed networks and on-premises environments requiring high security levels, such as nuclear power and financial sectors.
The government will sign an agreement with the Naver Cloud consortium this month and provide 256 Nvidia B200 GPUs over a 10-month period. The arrangement involves an initial five-month support period, after which a mid-term evaluation will determine whether the remaining five months of support will be granted. The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to immediately form a working-level task force with the selected contractor to accelerate results.
The development output will be released as open source. The plan is to support AI transformation across South Korea’s security industry through this release, and to pursue model refinement and industry expansion through follow-up projects starting in 2027.
The project was conceived in response to the rapid sophistication of cyber threats, as generative AI and autonomous AI agents are increasingly used for vulnerability discovery, attack path analysis, and attack code generation. A key objective is to address the limitation that general-purpose AI models, while trained on publicly available security knowledge, lack sufficient access to actual attack and defense data generated in South Korea’s security field.
With this selection, all three of the government’s flagship AI initiatives are now fully underway. The “Dokpamo” project, aimed at developing an independent AI foundation model, has advanced LG AI Research, SK Telecom, and Upstage to the third evaluation round, with the final selection of two teams expected early next year. The “AI for Everyone” project, designed to create a free AI ecosystem for all South Korean citizens, has selected consortia led by SK Telecom, Kakao, and KT, with beta services launching at the end of this month and full service scheduled for December.