KISIA confirmed its intent to cooperate with the winning NAVER Cloud consortium, though the association is still exploring what that participation will actually look like. Chairman Jinsoo Kim announced the shift at a press briefing on Monday in Seoul.
Kim, who is also CEO of KORNIC Glory, said specific participation forms remain undecided while the association works through the necessary procedures. The government selected the NAVER Cloud consortium to develop the critical AI foundation model, leaving KISIA to pivot toward the winning side.
Why the SK Telecom Bid Didn’t Land
KISIA had originally joined a consortium led by SK Telecom, but that group was not chosen as the project operator. The KISIA-SK Telecom consortium included 13 companies and organizations, among them domestic security firms like AhnLab and SK Shieldus, alongside several academic institutions.
Losing that bid forced KISIA to look for another path into the national AI model, since sitting out entirely wasn’t a viable option for an association representing hundreds of security firms.
Putting 340 Companies’ Threat Data to Work
KISIA wants to integrate cybersecurity domain knowledge from its 340 member companies directly into a specialized domestic cybersecurity AI model. Kim framed this around what he called a need for a K-Mythos
to counter advanced threats.
It is essential to put the cybersecurity domain knowledge of our 340 member companies into a specialized model to respond to Mythos,
Kim said, tying the effort to building a more localized defense system.
What NAVER Cloud’s Consortium Brings
The winning NAVER Cloud consortium is a broad coalition spanning domestic industry, academic, research, and public sector organizations, and it’s deploying advanced infrastructure to build AI models tailored to South Korea’s specific cybersecurity environment.
A partnership with KISIA could hand the consortium something it doesn’t already have in-house: industry-specific threat data drawn from hundreds of security firms actively working the problem day to day. That kind of practical, field-tested data is exactly what tends to separate a general purpose model from one that actually understands how threats evolve in a specific market.
Formalizing KISIA’s Role
The immediate focus now is on defining how KISIA fits into the consortium, and how its members’ data and expertise will actually get integrated into the model.
We worked with SK Telecom because we believed South Korea needs its own K-Mythos, and we now have the willingness to cooperate with NAVER as well and are going through the relevant process,
Kim said. The next steps involve settling on specific collaboration models, though no formal terms have been announced yet.
Follow Hashlytics on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn , Telegram and X to Get Instant Updates
