South Korea tests Kakao multimodal model in first AI safety review

South Korea is signaling that it doesn’t just want to build competitive models; it wants to be able to measure and certify them on its own terms. By running its first official safety evaluation on Kakao’s Kanana Essence 1.5 and explicitly benchmarking it against Llama and Mistral, the government is both boosting a domestic champion and stress‑testing the idea of national AI safety infrastructure. Participation in the International Network for Advanced AI Measurement and Evaluation means Seoul wants its tools to matter in global rule‑setting, not just local compliance.

For the AGI race, this is another step toward a world where powerful models are routinely inspected by specialized state labs before they’re deployed widely. That doesn’t slow research at the frontier much in the short term, but it does create a feedback loop: model builders will start optimizing not just for benchmarks like MMLU or GSM‑8K, but for passing country‑specific red‑team tests and alignment evaluations. If Korea’s methodology proves rigorous and interoperable with UK, US or EU efforts, we could see a de facto global bar emerge for what “safe enough” looks like — raising compliance costs but potentially reducing catastrophic‑risk blind spots.