Korea AI Safety Institute budget proposed to increase by 23.8%, model evaluation operating expenses only increase by 1.7%

South Korean lawmaker Lee Jung-hyun disclosed that the AI Safety Institute's 2027 government budget proposal is 15.944 billion KRW, up 23.8% from this year, but the increase mainly comes from R&D. The R&D budget for trusted AI safety technology rises from 3.975 billion KRW to 6.891 billion KRW, an increase of 73.3%, accounting for about 95% of the budget increase; the Ministry of Science and ICT will continue to support anti-deepfake detection and adversarial attack resilience projects, and will launch two new AI safety evaluation and verification technology projects. In contrast, the non-R&D budget for evaluating released AI models, cooperating with domestic and international safety agencies, and analyzing threat trends only rises from 8.9 billion KRW to 9.053 billion KRW, an increase of 1.7%. The number of AI models evaluated by the institute increased from 6 in March to 11 in August, an increase of about 83%; evaluating an agent-type AI model typically takes 7 to 10 days, cyber threat evaluation takes 3 to 4 days, and the cost of running one benchmark can reach 50 million to 60 million KRW.