Prime Minister Kim Min-seok announced a sweeping set of regulatory reforms designed to accelerate South Korea’s artificial intelligence sector during a visit to Naver’s Sejong AI Data Center on November 27. The on-site meeting brought together leaders from major tech companies—including Naver, Kakao, Samsung SDS, and Nota AI—and marked the rollout of the government’s first New Industry Regulatory Rationalization Roadmap focused on AI.
The roadmap includes 67 detailed deregulatory tasks across four categories: AI technology development, service deployment, infrastructure, and trust and safety standards. According to the Office for Government Policy Coordination, the measures aim to remove legal uncertainty, reduce operational burdens, and strengthen Korea’s competitiveness in an era defined by rapid AI transformation.
A central focus is unlocking data for AI training, long cited by Korean developers as a major barrier. By December 2025, the government will publish guidelines clarifying when copyrighted works can be used for AI learning under “fair use”—a gray area that has hindered domestic model development. Agencies will also begin releasing the “Top 100 High-Value Public Data” sets for AI training and create new standards for “AI-ready” public data starting in 2026.
To speed AI commercialization, the roadmap expands autonomous driving test zones to full city units and empowers local governments to approve pilot operations beginning in early 2026. Regulations on AI robots—including parking robots and outdoor mobile robots—will also be restructured to shorten certification times and modernize outdated safety rules.
Prime Minister Kim highlighted AI data centers as strategic infrastructure, calling them “AI highways” essential for national competitiveness. He reaffirmed plans to secure 260,000 advanced GPUs by 2030 through public-private cooperation, deploying them across national AI centers to support model development and industry innovation.
Infrastructure reforms will reduce costs for data center operators by easing requirements on mandatory artwork installations and revising elevator installation rules that currently apply even to restricted-access server rooms.
To strengthen safe AI deployment, the government will formalize the definition of “high-impact AI”—systems that affect life, safety, or fundamental rights—and introduce binding standards for reliability and oversight beginning in early 2026. New guidelines for AI recruitment systems will also aim to prevent algorithmic bias and protect job seekers.
Prime Minister Kim emphasized that the reforms represent “the beginning of a substantive economic alliance between government and industry,” urging ministries to implement the roadmap swiftly and pledging continued collaboration to ensure regulations “do not hinder AI innovation but accelerate it.”
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