According to Korean media reports, the Ministry of Science and ICT's budget for artificial intelligence (AI) related items this year exceeds 5 trillion won, while the budget for hacking response amounts to only around 1.6% of the AI budget. According to data obtained by Democratic Party lawmaker Lee Hun-ki from the Ministry of Science and ICT, the ministry's AI budget for 2026 will reach 5.0938 trillion won. By comparison, the budget related to hacking response and prevention is 79.062 billion won, equivalent to just 1.6% of the AI budget.
As the ministry in charge of the AI industry, the Ministry of Science and ICT's AI budget has grown rapidly over the past three years: 1.1424 trillion won in 2024, 3.4147 trillion won in 2025, and an expected 5.0938 trillion won in 2026, representing a 345.9% increase from 2024. By contrast, hacking response budgets over the same period were 63.438 billion won in 2024, 79.485 billion won in 2025, and 79.062 billion won in 2026, an increase of just 24.6% from 2024.
Notably, this year's budget is 423 million won lower than last year's, a decrease of roughly 0.5%. As a result, the ratio of hacking response budget to AI budget has fallen from 5.6% in 2024 to 2.3% in 2025, and further to 1.6% this year, with the gap between growth in the AI budget and growth in the hacking response budget continuing to widen.
Imbalanced budget allocation at South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT
Overall information protection and cybersecurity budgets grew from 325.139 billion won in 2024 to 366.295 billion won in 2026, but their share of the AI budget over the same period dropped from 28% to 7.2%. According to statistics from the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), 1,236 cases of infringement incidents were reported and received in the first half of this year, up 19.5% from the first half of last year. The analysis attributes this to improved corporate awareness of reporting infringement incidents following last year's chain hacking incident involving the three major telecommunications companies.
The Ministry of Science and ICT is responsible not only for nurturing the AI industry but also for information protection and responding to hacking and infringement incidents. In its work plan for the second half of 2026, the ministry has listed investigation of hacking incidents in the private sector, promotion of comprehensive information protection measures, development of security-specialized AI models, and vulnerability inspections as key tasks. Despite this, this year's hacking response budget is still around 423 million won lower than last year's, or roughly 0.5%. The Ministry of Science and ICT has set the AI budget at 9.4211 trillion won in next year's budget proposal, an 84.3% increase from this year, and plans to invest in the development of security-specialized models and services and the dissemination of AI security services for small and medium-sized enterprises to counter increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, though specific allocation figures have not been disclosed.