The government intends to give every citizen free and unlimited access to an AI chatbot, with a beta service in September and full rollout by December. The Ministry of Science and ICT set out the plan, called AI for Everyone, at a policy briefing with President Lee Jae Myung on Thursday.
Two or three operators are due to be selected in August from applications now being accepted. The service is to run on domestically developed models and connect to government systems, so that permit applications and official information searches can be handled through the same interface. In 2027 the plan upgrades again, to a personal AI agent for each citizen.
The arithmetic
Each operator is allocated 256 Nvidia B200 GPUs. On the ministry's own reckoning that supports about 18.4 million daily active users. Around 23 million Koreans already use AI tools, so the headroom is thin before the service opens, and demand for something free tends to exceed demand for the same thing priced.
Funding is the sharper question. Government support is scheduled to begin in 2027, with the amount undetermined, and operators are expected to match it based on projected usage. That leaves the first months of a free national service running on money that has not been fully specified.
What the industry says
An official at an AI service company said what remains unclear is how token costs will be covered and how the service's financial sustainability will be maintained. Every query carries a compute cost, and a service that is free and unlimited has no mechanism to moderate that cost as usage grows.
There is a second concern. A capable free service attracts the heaviest users of paid products, and heavy users consume disproportionate compute. That leaves operators choosing between restricting quality and absorbing costs that rise with success.
Operator selection in August is the next milestone, and the terms those operators accept will show whether the economics have been settled or deferred.