49.3% of new Korean SI models on Hugging Face in January–August are built on a Chinese base, 35.9% on an American one, 14.9% on a domestic one
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Open models from Chinese labs have become the foundation of almost half of Korean developments; the country is worried about dependence.
The think tank Rockbridge Network Korea analysed 1,845 models published on Hugging Face by Korean accounts in January–August 2026. The Qwen family accounted for 46.8% of all models (864), Google Gemma for 14.7%, Meta Llama for 13.8%, LG's EXAONE for 9.3% and Kakao's Kanana for 2.7%. In a survey of 102 small and medium-sized companies, 80.2% pointed to data leaks and 67.7% to opaque handling of personal data. An industry representative quoted by the paper names technological dependence and supply-chain vulnerability as the main risk.
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