The new administration in South Korea has identified becoming one of the world’s top three AI powers as a core national priority. At the same time, frequent hacking incidents have raised serious concerns about cybersecurity. How would you articulate the strategic importance of cybersecurity in building a globally competitive AI ecosystem?

As Taiwan’s cyber ambassador, first digital minister, and architect of the Taiwan Model, I see the strategic importance of what we call cyber resilience as fundamental to preserving democratic values in the AI era.

My background as a civic hacker taught me that we are currently in an offense-dominant landscape. AI enhances the capabilities of attackers far more than it increases the capabilities of defenders. Using AI to find vulnerabilities or synthesize scams is easy; designing a system with no vulnerabilities is hard.

Without robust cyber resilience, advancements in AI can be easily co-opted to undermine societal trust. We see this materialize in the spread of deepfakes and misinformation, which erodes our shared sense of reality—our epistemic security.

My experience in Taiwan has shown that freedom and security are not a trade-off; they are mutually reinforcing. The key is adopting open-source principles and radical transparency. We need that in AI governance to cultivate a trustworthy environment where diverse perspectives collaborating—or Plurality—can flourish.

Centralized defense doesn’t work well anymore because it creates single points of failure. In an offense-dominant situation, that single point of failure becomes very attractive. Instead, we need to embrace decentralized resilience, where every attack strengthens our collective immunity.

A globally competitive AI ecosystem must prioritize an AI race to safety instead of just a race to capability. Concretely, this means focusing on assistive AI—AI that augments human agency—rather than just a centralized super-AI that holds our personal data. We involve citizens in AI regulation through open processes like Alignment Assemblies, using technology to bridge differences. This continuous co-creation hardens our digital infrastructure and ensures our AI aligns with society.

How vulnerable are centralized systems that hold massive amounts of data in this landscape?

Everybody who holds massive amounts of personal data is vulnerable. The more centralized you are, the more attractive you are to the attacker.

This is why in Taiwan, we’re switching away from centralizing all personal information in one place. We collect credentials, not identifiers. For example, with our decentralized ID wallet, if you want to prove you’re over 18 years old, you can just prove you’re an adult without revealing your age. If you want to prove that you are a resident of some area, you can prove that fact without revealing your address.

By collecting these credentials using zero-knowledge proofs, it doesn’t re-identify you. Because of that, the attack surface is much smaller. Even if attackers gain control of the system, they do not have sufficient information to retrieve this personal data.

We also shouldn’t think of resilience as insurance that you pay in the hope it will get paid back sometime in the future. Cybersecurity investments must pay dividends along the way. For example, switching from passwords to passkeys is a security measure, but it also means you don’t have to type or remember everything. It’s also a time saver.

South Korea has positioned sovereign AI as a cornerstone of its national strategy. Given its strength in memory semiconductors, how do you assess Korea’s technological capabilities and potential role within the global AI value chain?

While TSMC excels in compute and chip manufacturing, South Korea is very strong in memory semiconductors, like high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and DRAM. Both are critical layers in the global AI value chain, the foundation upon which the entire AI architecture is built.

I think we are very complementary. It’s vital that companies like Samsung and SK Hynix are supplying the essential hardware that powers the global AI accelerators, just like TSMC is doing on the compute modules.

I also think cyber resilience and democratic governance are equally important. South Korea’s potential is immense, but to secure a long-term, trusted role—especially within alliances like Chip 4—we need to align our technological leadership with open governance, where no voice is left behind.

The key to security in the global value chain is not independence, but interdependence . When all democratic partners are indispensable to each other, we collectively raise the cost of disruption.

The ability to steer AI is far more important than just for one country to press ahead with the accelerator; all countries in a democratic alliance need to be able to steer it together. As Samsung’s own research has shown, for specific tasks, smaller, specialized models are often sufficient. They are actually better because they are more energy-efficient and more attuned to local cultural norms. This kind of Edge AI or “Small AI” is something we can develop together.

My hope is that South Korea will export not just cutting-edge hardware, but also the values of openness and transparency in AI development, powered by the next generation of recursive, small, tiny model learning. By focusing on making civic AI possible, with community-tunable AI, our countries can collectively build a more resilient and participatory digital future.

Do you see sovereign AI as a strategic instrument for countries outside the U.S. and China to maintain their autonomy and competitiveness in the AI era?

The point is that in an open ecosystem, it is not about creating isolated national tech stacks. It is about ensuring digital autonomy through collaboration on democratic values and, importantly, open-source principles.

The isolated stack approach is sometimes called Singularity, or vertical alignment—the pursuit of ever-larger, centralized models. It requires massive capital investment using the transformer architecture, which exceeds what most nations can do. Usually, only the G2 can do this. I don’t think South Korea is trying to overtake the G2 when it comes to capital investment, nor is Taiwan. We shouldn’t.

The alternative approach, which we champion in Taiwan, is Plurality, or horizontal alignment. This means not a top-down sovereign deciding for everyone, but rather a civic approach. In Taiwan, we have 16 indigenous nations; they are all sovereign in some sense. It means empowering all those groups to fine-tune their own small models, rather than having decisions dictated by a huge national or corporate headquarters.

This approach counters authoritarian influence because it fosters a diffusion of diverse viewpoints. Because these models are open source, they can be small enough to run locally without continuous internet access. Then we gain true autonomy: the means to bypass top-down censorship from foreign places. The idea is to bring our own policies—for example, to protect children—and run them on open, responsible models.

This turns AI into a tool for democratic resilience rather than a vector for top-down control, as the Beijing model is currently doing. This enhances the competitiveness of all participating countries by shifting the focus from possessing the largest AI to harnessing the collective intelligence of our people.

The benefit of horizontal alignment is like LEGO blocks: South Korea makes some pieces, we make some pieces, but because everything is open, we can build upon each other’s work. This commitment to fast, fair, and fun civic innovation is our most valuable export.

Korea’s AI development is driven mainly by large corporations. Is this open-source, pluralistic approach actually possible here?

I think so. You have, for example, the tiny recursive model from Samsung, which is open source. Honeybee from Kakao Brain is open source. There are many researchers contributing. Indeed, the open-source flagship product Linux was also sponsored by many large corporations, like Red Hat (now IBM). I don’t think large corporations inherently cannot do open source; they just need to engage the community in good faith.

Which companies—one global and one Korean—are currently capturing your attention, and why?

Globally, I was just in Japan meeting with a company called Sakana AI. They have a very particular model—not just artificial intelligence, but artificial life. They use an evolutionary, multi-agent approach. They don’t want one giant model; they want a collective intelligence of small, specialized agents that collaborate and evolve together—symbiosis. This engineering expression is very similar to the Plurality idea. Instead of scaling a single monolith, they orchestrate swarms that adapt, self-improve, and divide work intelligently.

This vision pairs naturally with Samsung. Beyond its leadership in memory and devices—I’ve used the Galaxy Note and Fold for many years, since the original Note, because I use the stylus a lot and Samsung phones have some of the best—the Samsung Research Center has revealed in a recent paper that “less is more.” Tiny, recursive models that iteratively refine their own reasoning can surpass far larger systems on structured tasks, such as solving Sudoku.

This “small-but-smart” direction dovetails with Sakana’s agent swarms: many compact experts coordinating locally, enabled by Samsung research and hardware, rather than relying on some distant model in the cloud.

The synergy is profound. Samsung provides the substrate — energy-efficient semiconductors, HBM for accelerators, and billions of edge “SmartThings” endpoints in phones, wearables, and appliances. Sakana supplies the coordination and evolutionary logic — agentic collectives that run on-device, preserving privacy, reducing latency, and shrinking the cloud attack surface.

Imagine Samsung networks where local agents schedule power use across a neighborhood, optimize transit in real time, or deliver personal assistance and care for the elderly through relational health—without constantly exporting private data to the cloud.

This is sovereign, assistive AI in practice: resilient by design, privacy-preserving by default, and aligned with democratic oversight because everybody can steer it locally. It prioritizes a race to safety and trust over a race to larger, more monopolistic models. In my ongoing conversations with South Korean counterparts, this blend—cybersecurity first, chip-driven innovation second—underscores why Korea, and Samsung in particular, are essential partners for building a plural, trustworthy AI future.

Some argue that the US maintains hegemony over AI development, pushing other countries to pursue sovereign AI. What is your view?

I don’t think the US controls AI development. The US had a head start, of course, in applying the transformer architecture. But now people realize that less can be more. If you are translating, summarizing, or doing deep research on a mathematical puzzle, you do not need a huge model to do those very useful tasks. On these specific, narrow applications of AI, you do not need the same kind of capital investment we have seen in Silicon Valley.

This is like when I was young, people thought of computers as mainframes—huge CapEx investments. But then Taiwan came up with the idea of IBM PC compatibles: personal computing. It’s a tiny fraction of what the mainframe does, but you can steer your personal computer, responding to you and your community, and you can connect them together into the Internet. This horizontal way is very different from the vertical. I would not say that “mainframe AI” has hegemony over horizontal AI.

What about China’s ambition to become the world’s AI leader?

It depends on what you are using AI for. If it’s about authoritarian control, making citizens transparent to the state, social credit, and micromanaging the population, of course, they are unmatched in the world. They are running one way, and we, the free world, are running the other way. They are the leaders in that direction because we are not going to run there.

Every country has a different idea of what counts as progress. Taiwan, like Korea, believes in open innovation and the civic sector. The Beijing model, unfortunately, cannot make full use of the civic sector, journalism, or other distributed collective intelligence.

This is why we need to prioritize talent in these open ecosystems. People contributing to GitHub for eight years can get a Gold Card in Taiwan, and we’re seeing similar efforts in other democracies. This free flow of not just data with trust, but also talent with trust, is something we need to build together. I don’t think Beijing, with their model, is very attractive to digital nomads and this kind of co-creation.

Are there ongoing projects in Taiwan to develop foundational models?

There are many. The idea is not a single one for the entire Taiwan, but more than 150 smaller models, each for a different application area. This is the investment strategy of our National Development Fund.

We need to empower people closest to the pain points. If you just have one foundational model for the 20 national languages in Taiwan, it will be felt as one culture colonizing the other 19 cultures. But if you have more than 150 smaller models, each tuned freely by the people participating in that particular context, then it will be felt as something truly civic that cares about their use and responses.

South Korea and Taiwan both sit at the heart of geostrategic competition. How has Taiwan approached balancing technological sovereignty with foreign policy? And how do you see “tech middle powers” like Korea shaping the future global digital order?

First of all, we don’t think of sovereignty as closing our borders and refusing foreign ideas and talents. That’s not our way. We balance sovereignty with foreign policy through radical transparency and democratic values, instead of censorship.

In Taiwan, we have faced the top polarization attacks from foreign interference in the world for twelve years, yet we are still the most free in all of Asia when it comes to internet freedom. We don’t believe in taking down speech, though we do modulate reach.

We advance open-source defense and societal conversation using tools like Polis and Alignment Assemblies to synthesize public input on technology ethics. We co-govern AI with speed. Our foreign policy is an act of sharing our democratic toolkit. By solving digital challenges openly, our solutions become a global benchmark.

For example, we brought know-your-customer (KYC) digital signatures to online advertisements. If an ad is not signed and somebody gets scammed, the platform—Facebook, YouTube, or whatever—will be liable for the full damage. If a foreign platform does not register a local legal representative or pay the liability, we can throttle their speed without censoring their website.

Tech middle powers like South Korea and Taiwan must become the world’s chief norm entrepreneurs. We start a norm and shape tomorrow together by popularizing that norm—for example, about steering AI instead of stopping or accelerating AI blindly. We possess the technological capability and democratic values to reject the false binary between the US and the Beijing models.

Again, the key to security is interdependence. As long as Taiwan and South Korea are indispensable to the rest of the world—through critical supply chains and by demonstrating that democracy delivers better outcomes—we are safe together.

South Korea is perfectly positioned to set new global norms that prioritize digital human rights and promote Plurality over polarization. Both our countries have seen polarization firsthand; we have all lived through spikes of very high “PPM”—polarization per minute. By coalescing with other middle powers to create a third, democratic path for digital governance—including building shared digital public infrastructure that prevents techno-feudalism—South Korea can leverage its weight to stabilize a fragile digital world.

Korea has experienced significant political polarization recently. What are your thoughts on the causes of this polarization in the digital age?

Ten years ago, we saw YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms switch from a “following” feed—where you follow people and see their posts—to a “For You” feed, where the algorithm pushes things you did not follow to your eyes.

This is an AI that I call a “parasitic AI.” It just wants to maximize our addiction to the screen, and they figured out that the best way to keep us engaged is to keep us enraged.

The “For You” algorithms started pushing our differences, which become like volcanic magma. The algorithms then push even more extreme content to keep us hooked. Over time, we may be very similar, but because of this feed, we become polarized, hating each other. That’s the high PPM exhaust from those recommendation algorithms.

While people have their differences, most people are in the middle and agree with their neighbors most of the time. But online, you have the illusion of polarization. You think the people on the other side are so extreme and hateful that you must react now. Then, the most extreme responses get virality, and both sides get even more extreme.

If you get caught in one of these loops, I call it “human in the loop of AI,” like a hamster wheel. The hamster runs faster and faster and may feel very excited, but the hamster controls no direction. It’s the AI doing the steering. Drastic responses may feel urgently needed, but they might be partially the result of this polarization-per-minute situation caused by the recommendation system.

How do we navigate this situation when algorithms force us to only see the news they want us to see?

This is why fixing the recommendation system so it surfaces bridging ideas instead of extreme ideas is the most important thing. We need to build a “geothermal engine” that turns this heat into momentum to move forward together.

I have been advising efforts to build this. For example, on BlueSky, we’re working with the Green Earth initiative to build customized feeds using language models to translate both sides into language both can understand. If one side says “climate justice” and another says “creation care,” the model can translate across one another. This language-model-powered feed is now also being rolled out on X.com.

As a tech middle power, Korea is aiming to be a G3 country in AI. How can middle powers collaborate and address challenges like misinformation?

The point here is collaborative leadership. If you use a closed model, you can succeed alone or fail alone. But if you use an open, plural model, then we all succeed together. It is an ecosystem, not an egotistical play.

In Taiwan, for the misinformation issue, we use this collaborative method instead of the government dictating what is true or resorting to censorship. We work with civil society, students, and teachers to do “pre-bunking”—preempting information manipulation—not debunking after the fact. Instead of centralizing a Ministry of Truth that competes against journalists, we work with journalists through strategies like “humor over rumor.”

This general pattern can build middle powers together into a powerhouse by building a larger horizontal tent. Using technologies to bridge divides within this horizontal coalition can de-escalate conflict in our region as well. This is not just about building better AI or averting AI risks; it also pays dividends like solving polarization, solving hate, and solving regional escalation along the way.

Even within our own polities, there are many divides—ideological, urban-rural, gender, ethnic. By investing together in civic AI and horizontal alignment, we can solve these divides by reaching over them and building AI systems that empower civil society along with the government.

Finally, what is your key message regarding the future of digital democracy?

I think we, the people, are already the superintelligence we’re looking for. We do not need a machine superintelligence to solve all human problems and leave humanity behind.

We need only to strengthen the connections across different cultures and different lines of division so that we tap into our latent superintelligent powers. Then we can overcome the emerging challenges, not by just accelerating or decelerating, but rather by steering better.

As a cyber ambassador, the word “cyber”—from the Greek kybernetes —means steering. So let’s steer together and free the future together.