Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon Frames AI as Basic Infrastructure

An AI patrol robot now circles the grounds of Deoksu Palace in Seoul, watching for fires, intruders and people who have collapsed and need help. AI digital learning centres have opened in crowded places such as the main railway station in Busan. According to reports, the face of the government AI drive behind these scenes is Bae Kyung-hoon, South Korea's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT. In a recent interview with a foreign news outlet, he said AI should be seen as "basic infrastructure, like electricity" that every citizen should be able to use "without having to worry about the cost."

The basic infrastructure doctrine he has put forward treats AI not as a product sold by a handful of companies but as a public utility that should run everywhere like power lines. While some leading AI developers warn the technology could threaten human survival, Bae sees AI as the key to a "good future," reports said. A 25-year AI researcher who led the development of the Exaone large model at LG AI Research, he joined the Lee Jae-myung government last year. On July 9 Hanbit Media published his book, To You, Who Fear AI: 14 Answers from Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon, which reports say he co-wrote with ministry staff. In it he tells parents worried about their children's education that "AI is not something to memorize but a tool for solving problems together," arguing that the ability to ask good questions matters more than coding classes.

The program where the basic infrastructure doctrine takes its most concrete form is AI for Everyone. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT announcement METAL reviewed, the government on August 28 chose SK Telecom, Kakao and KT from six consortia that applied. The three operators will build general-purpose AI chatbots along with public AI agents that handle complicated application procedures so citizens do not miss out on benefits. The government is providing 512 NVIDIA B200 GPUs this year and will fund the service from the state budget from 2027. After agreements in September and a beta period, the official launch is targeted within the year, and according to reports the government's aim is for all 51.6 million citizens to use services built mainly on domestic models for free.

A look at the design shows the electricity comparison is no exaggeration. The SK Telecom consortium will let people call up the AI by phone call and text message as well as through apps and the web, so older people unfamiliar with smartphone apps can use it without installing anything. Kakao will use its everyday messenger as the entry point and release a lite version of a phone-call AI with LG Uplus within the year. KT will connect the Daum portal, partner channels such as Danawa, Musinsa and Zigbang, and even IPTV as doorways to the AI. Just as someone plugging into a wall socket does not need to know where the power plant is, the idea is that the same AI switches on whichever door a person walks through.

The race to build the models themselves is far rougher. The sovereign AI foundation model project, launched in August 2025, gives teams government GPUs and funding and drops the weakest team every six months, which has drawn comparisons abroad to the elimination rounds of the drama Squid Game. In the second evaluation on August 18, Upstage, SK Telecom and LG AI Research advanced while Motif Technologies was cut, bringing the number of eliminated teams to three. The evaluation was scored out of 100 points, with 40 for benchmarks, 35 for experts and 25 for users, and 49 expert AI users and 185 members of the public took part in the user evaluation, while the government is raising GPU support for the three remaining teams from 768 B200s in the first half to about 1,000 in the second half. METAL previously reported that Lee Moontae, head of LG AI Research's Superintelligence Lab, named sovereign AI as the key to superintelligence, and this contest is the state's mechanism for growing that sovereign AI directly.

Money is also pouring in on an unprecedented scale. The Ministry of Science and ICT's 2027 budget proposal, approved by the Cabinet on September 1, totals 29.6476 trillion won, up 24.5% (5.8272 trillion won) from this year's supplementary budget and the largest ever. AI spending rises 84.3% to 9.4 trillion won, close to a third of the total, and 5.5937 trillion won alone goes to securing top-tier sovereign AI models through infrastructure of around 10,000 GPUs, data and talent. According to reports, up to 3.85 trillion won of that is earmarked for 10,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips, funded by tax revenue from the AI-driven chip boom. Koo Hyuk-chae, the ministry's First Vice Minister, who presented the budget, said: "The 2027 budget proposal is not a simple spending plan but a strategic investment plan to create new opportunities for growth and drive a great leap toward an irreplaceable Korea."

His answer to calls for slowing down was just as clear. On September 16, shortly after OpenAI, Anthropic and others argued that AI development should slow, Bae wrote on his X account: "From Korea's standpoint, one thing is clear. We do not have the luxury of slowing AI down right now." METAL previously reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on pacing AI. Bae countered that "a country that is ahead adjusting its speed and a country that must catch up while creating new markets choosing to slow itself down are entirely different matters." He added that "speed is competitiveness and safety is sustainability, so this is not a matter of choosing one," and that "we will not slow Korea's AI clock, and we will go faster and more safely."

The root of this urgency is a fear of dependence. Even if SK hynix and Samsung Electronics make the high-bandwidth memory that powers AI, the models built on top of it could belong to someone else. According to reports, that concern grew after the US government temporarily imposed export controls in June on Anthropic's newest models, Fable and Mythos. Bae said in the interview that just as it is impossible to work without computers today, it will soon be impossible to work without AI, and that people have been asking, "What happens if we depend on American AI and then one day it is controlled or the price becomes too high?" He estimated that Korea is six to ten months behind the leaders in the US and China, but said the gap would narrow.

Public enthusiasm runs as hot as the government's. In an Ipsos survey of 32 countries in June, 74% of South Koreans said they were excited about AI products and services, far above the 51% average and 33% in the US. App analytics firm Wiseapp estimated in July that ChatGPT had 24 million monthly active users in Korea, close to 46% of the population. Bae explained that shocks from the Korean War to the 1997 financial crisis had built an instinct for rapid adaptation and that compressed growth had left little room to take life slowly, giving Koreans a very strong tendency to always be early adopters.

Seen through a sociologist's lens, this fervor is closer to a survival strategy than to optimism. According to reports, a sociologist who this year interviewed about 70 people in professions exposed to AI disruption, such as patent attorneys, accountants and tax advisers, found that the attitude reflects anxiety and competition rather than cheerful expectation, and read Koreans' response to AI as an extension of a determination to survive. In the same Ipsos survey, 55% of South Koreans said AI would make the job market worse, higher than the 40% average across surveyed countries. A freelance designer who works mostly for small businesses said some clients have started handling ordinary design work with AI themselves and that sales may have dipped slightly as a result, while a translator and interpreter whose productivity has risen with AI answers the question of whether they fear being replaced with "This company is using me," reports said. Excitement at 74% and anxiety at 55% overlap within the same society.

Bae's answer lies in distribution. "Many people predict that AI will enormously increase the wealth gap in capitalist societies," he said. "The question President Lee Jae-myung and I are interested in is whether we could instead design AI in a way that reduces inequality." He invited people to imagine a world in which their AI generates a certain amount of basic income, saying that if everyone could take part in economic activity through AI and their own AI and robots guaranteed a basic standard of living, people could devote themselves to more valuable work.

Korea's paradox is that the more anxious a society is, the faster it climbs aboard a new technology, and Bae's basic infrastructure doctrine is the policy language that attaches a direction, distribution, to that speed. Just as the age of home appliances began only after electricity reached every house, he has placed his bet on putting AI into every hand first and narrowing gaps on top of it. The official launch of AI for Everyone at the end of the year will be the day that bet first reaches people's daily lives.