South Korea Promises Every Citizen a Free National AI

South Korea wants to hand every one of its citizens a free AI assistant, and it wants most of that assistant to be Korean. On July 14 the Ministry of Science and ICT opened bidding for a project it calls "AI for Everyone," an unlimited chatbot and public-service helper that the government will pay for and that any resident can use at no charge.

Reported by The Star and others, the plan has two tiers. The first is a general chatbot, due in public beta in late September and a full national launch before the end of the year. The second, planned for later in 2026 and into 2027, is more ambitious: a public-service agent that finds the government benefits and programs a person qualifies for, warns them before a deadline passes, and helps them apply through the same interface. Companies have until August 11 to submit proposals.

Homegrown, up to a point

The condition that gives the project its character is a floor on domestic technology. At least half of the system must run on Korean-built AI models, part of a push to cut the country's reliance on American chatbots. That ambition runs into an awkward fact. To power the first service, the ministry is handing the winning bidders 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs. The software may be sovereign. The silicon underneath it is not, and there is no Korean replacement for it yet.

The move also lands against a striking bit of consumer behaviour. Korean outlets report that some 23 million people in the country have stopped paying for ChatGPT, a number the government is happy to cite as it markets a free alternative. Seoul is pairing the chatbot with a new national AI law, treating access to the technology as closer to public infrastructure than a private subscription.

A model others may copy

South Korea is not alone in thinking this way. The idea of a state-provided AI service, offered the way a country offers roads or a postal system, is gaining ground as governments worry about depending on a handful of foreign firms. Korea is further along than most, with a launch date this year and real money behind it. Whether a government-run chatbot can keep pace with models that improve every few weeks is the harder question, and the late-September beta will start to answer it.