A customer walks by an SKT store in Seoul, April 29. YonhapSK Telecom is assembling an unusual alliance of artificial intelligence (AI) developers, cybersecurity companies and universities to build an AI model designed to defend Korea against increasingly complex cyberthreats. SKT said Thursday that it had submitted an application for a government-led project to develop an AI foundation model specialized in cybersecurity, joining forces with Upstage, nine security companies, Korea University, Soongsil University and the Korea Information Security Industry Association (KISIA).The consortium brings together two of the three teams that recently passed the second-stage evaluation of the government’s independent AI foundation model project, with SKT and Upstage contributing their respective model-development expertise.The companies plan to develop a security-focused model based on SKT’s A.X K family and Upstage’s Solar Open models, then combine it with AI agents that could automate tasks from detecting threats to responding to them.SKT said the system will be trained and tested using data and expertise from real-world security operations, creating a cycle of development, field testing, evaluation and retraining.Nine security companies — SK Shieldus, Secui, AhnLab, IGLOO Corporation, RaonSecure, SmartM2M, Aim Intelligence, Genians and Piolink — will provide expertise across security monitoring, threat analysis, endpoint protection, network access control and vulnerability testing.The companies will also test the model through their commercial products and security operations, according to SKT.Korea University and Soongsil University will independently evaluate the model’s performance and safety, while KISIA will help disseminate the project’s results and connect them with workforce training.The push comes as security operations centers face growing workloads, with major centers in Korea handling as many as 10,000 threat alerts a day, according to SKT. SKT said its own security organization operates around the clock, with 129 dedicated personnel under its chief information security officer and a separate red-team unit that conducts vulnerability assessments from an attacker’s perspective.It added that the consortium would incorporate data and expertise from Korea’s security industry into a domestic AI model and build a practical security AI ecosystem capable of competing globally.This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.