Can South Korea Join the Frontier AI Race?

When the Chinese start-up DeepSeek stunned the world and rattled stock markets in late January with the release of DeepSeek-R1—an open-source generative artificial intelligence model that rivaled the most advanced U.S. models while using far less processing power than was thought necessary—South Korea joined a nervous wave of governments around the world making reflexive moves.

On Feb. 17, the South Korean government banned new downloads of the Chinese chatbot, citing data…