Nearly half of new Korean AI services based on Chinese foundation models

Korea's artificial intelligence (AI) development ecosystem is increasingly relying on Chinese foundation models, with data showing that nearly half of the models newly released by local developers this year were built on them, raising concerns that the country's AI industry could become technologically subordinate to China. According to a recent report by think tank Rockbridge Network Korea, Sunday, 49.3 percent of the 1,845 models published by Korea-based accounts on Hugging Face between January and August were based on Chinese models, compared with 35.9 percent based on U.S. models and 14.9 percent on domestic models. The share of new models built on Chinese foundations has been rapidly growing in past years, surging from 1.2 percent in 2023 to 22 percent in 2025, before nearly doubling this year. Qwen was the most widely used foundation model, accounting for 46.8 percent of the total, or 864 models. Google's Gemma ranked second with 14.7 percent, followed by Meta's Llama with 13.8 percent. LG AI Research's EXAONE ranked fourth at 9.3 percent, while Kakao's Kanana accounted for 2.7 pe