South Korea's Vice PM Says Country Cannot Afford to Slow Down AI Development

South Korea's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT, Bae Kyung-hoon, said on September 16 that the country must continue advancing artificial intelligence development and cannot afford to slow down, according to a Bloomberg interview.

Bae noted that South Korea, home to memory chip giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, has been a major beneficiary of the AI data center construction boom, with its semiconductor and hardware products seeing strong global demand.

"From South Korea's perspective, one thing is clear: we cannot afford to pay the price of slowing down AI development right now. There is a fundamental difference between countries that are already leading and choose to slow down, and countries that are still catching up and trying to create new markets," Bae said.

His stance differs from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow frontier AI development and strengthen independent oversight, and is closer to the views of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Industry figures supporting continued AI advancement argue that responsible and safe AI development can be ensured with careful measures, without the need for new laws or regulatory restrictions.

Bae said South Korea should accelerate AI research and application while strengthening safeguards against deepfakes, cyberattacks, and privacy risks. He also revealed plans to publicly announce the next phase of the country's sovereign AI foundation model initiative.