South Korea Will Give Every Citizen Free AI Access
2 min readSouth Korea is preparing to hand every one of its roughly 52 million residents a free, unlimited AI assistant, a move that would make it the first G20 nation to treat access to artificial intelligence as a public service. The Ministry of Science and ICT opened bidding on July 14 for the program, tentatively called “AI for Everyone.”
How the plan works
The government will select two or three companies to build and run the service, handing each up to 512 Nvidia B200 GPUs to power it. Applications are open through August 11, with a beta launch pencilled in for September and formal operations set to begin in December. Funding is committed to keep the service free through 2028.
A sovereign AI requirement
The most striking condition is where the answers come from. Winning bidders must route at least half of all user queries through domestic Korean foundation models, with another 30 percent drawn from other homegrown systems. That rule turns a consumer perk into industrial policy: it guarantees demand for Korean-built models rather than defaulting to American chatbots.
The rollout comes in two parts. Citizens first get a general-purpose chatbot for everyday questions. A second, more capable public-service agent is planned for later in 2026 and into 2027. That assistant is meant to proactively surface the government benefits and programs a person qualifies for, notify them, and even help file the applications directly.
Why it matters
Free national AI is quickly becoming a marker of technological sovereignty. By pairing universal access with a mandate for domestic models, Seoul is trying to solve two problems at once: closing the AI adoption gap among ordinary citizens while building a home market large enough to sustain its own model developers. The open questions are cost and dependence. The service still runs on American GPUs, and analysts will watch whether Korean models can match the quality users expect. If it works, expect other governments to copy the template.