Korea's AI Framework Act: the duties are in force, the penalties are deferred

01The clock

Korea is generally described as the second country in the world, after the EU, to pass a comprehensive national AI statute. The framing is accurate; the word "comprehensive" flatters the substance. There are no prohibited practices, no conformity assessment, no CE-style marking, and the majority of the Act's forty-three articles are industrial policy rather than regulation.

1. 21 January 2025 Act No. 20676 is promulgated

   With a one-year runway to commencement written into its addenda.

2. 20 January 2026 Amended two days before it took effect

   Act No. 21311 renamed the national AI council, added a training-data definition and provisions on AI-vulnerable groups. It left the compliance core — the transparency, safety, high-impact, investigation and penalty articles — untouched.

3. 22 January 2026 · in force The Act and its Enforcement Decree commence

   Presidential Decree No. 36053 arrives the day before commencement and settles the operative detail: transparency methods and exceptions, the compute threshold, the high-impact procedure, the five-year retention rule, the domestic-representative thresholds and the fine schedule.

4. 21 July 2026 The Decree is amended

   Presidential Decree No. 36506 adds vulnerable-group provisions, research institutes and support measures. The transparency, compute, retention, representative and fine articles are unchanged — despite several trackers reporting otherwise.

02Are you covered?

The nominal scope is very wide and the local-presence obligation is very narrow, which produces a large band of foreign operators who are legally bound but owe no local filing at all.

One relief for downstream operators: where you receive a system from an upstream operator that has already implemented the high-impact measures, and you do not significantly change its function or purpose, you are deemed to have implemented them yourself. You also have a right to ask the developer for the data you need to discharge those duties, and the developer must endeavour to cooperate.

03The transparency duties

Article 31 carries three duties, and they are frequently collapsed into one. They have different triggers, different subjects and — as it turns out — different enforcement consequences.

Two exceptions apply across all three duties: where the use of high-impact or generative AI is evident from the product name, the interface, the exterior or the output itself; and where the AI is used solely for internal business purposes. A third category exists in the Decree for cases the ministry may designate — but no such designation has been issued, so only two exceptions are live.

04The grace period

The single most misstated fact about this law. The ministry announced a guidance period of at least one year from commencement, during which it will defer both fact-finding investigations and administrative fines, reserving investigation for extremely exceptional cases such as loss of life or infringement of human rights.

Here is what matters: the guidance period has no basis in the Act or the Decree. Neither instrument's addenda contain a transitional provision suspending the investigation power or the penalty article. It is a discretionary enforcement-forbearance policy of the ministry, and nothing more. The obligations have been legally binding since 22 January 2026.

A grace period on penalties is not a grace period on the duty — and it is precisely the gap a contemporaneous record closes.

The practical consequence is a dating problem. When the period ends — and no instrument terminates it, so its end is a policy announcement too — the question will not be whether you comply today. It will be when you started. An organisation that began labelling in February 2026 and an organisation that began the week enforcement resumed look identical in a screenshot, and entirely different in a dated record.

05The five-year record

If your system is high-impact AI, the Act requires a set of measures — a risk management plan, an explanation plan, user protection plans, assigned human oversight, and documentation capable of verifying what you did. The Decree then adds the duty that matters most here.

Three points of precision. The obligation is to retain the basis — the evidence that you implemented the measures — not merely a copy of the policy. It applies to all six subparagraphs, not only the documentation one. And the Decree does not say when the five years starts running: not from the measure's date, not from decommissioning, not from last provision of the service. No notice or guideline resolves it, so the conservative reading is five years from implementation of each measure, running independently.

Be clear about what the law does and does not demand. There is no integrity, immutability or tamper-evidence requirement in the text. What the statute does create is a duty on a named domestic representative to inspect those documents for up-to-dateness and accuracy, and a power for officials to enter premises and inspect ledgers, documents and other data. A five-year evidentiary record that a named person must vouch for as current and accurate is a different engineering problem from a five-year folder.

Separately, high-impact operators must publicly post the main contents of the risk management and explanation plans, the user protection plan, and the name and contact details of the person supervising the system — a reputational instrument that bites harder than a KRW 30 million cap.

06What is not written yet

An accuracy-first page has to say what the law does not yet settle. Six subordinate instruments were contemplated and, as of this writing, none of the compliance-critical ones exist.

On the compute threshold specifically: the safety duties attach where training compute reaches 10²⁶ floating-point operations and the system is built on the most advanced technology in current use and its risk is likely to have widespread and significant impact. All three, conjunctively. A model above the floor that is not frontier-grade, or whose risk is not widespread, sits outside — and several outlets have wrongly reported the figure as the definition of high-impact AI, which is domain-based and has nothing to do with compute.

07Duty → receipt

This is where Planisphere enters, and not before. The Korea pack covers the notification and labelling acts — the recurring, per-event duties. It does not attempt to be your high-impact documentation set; those measures are yours, and most of them are documents rather than events.

Note system_class. High-impact status is a self-classification under this Act — you must assess in advance, and may optionally seek ministry confirmation. The record captures which class you relied on and when rather than endorsing that call, which is the only honest thing a record can do about a judgement that is yours to make.

Two properties matter more than the field list. Content never leaves your systems — commitments are hashes, so a record binds to a notice or an output without either being transmitted. And records are sealed on write: hash-chained, signed, and periodically anchored, so an edit to an earlier record breaks the chain in a way a third party can detect. Against a five-year retention duty and a named person attesting to accuracy, that difference is the whole point.

08The integration

One HTTPS call per act, from wherever the act happens. Nothing sits in your serving path.

Committing the notice text as a hash is what makes notice_version meaningful: when the wording changes, the commitment changes, so you can show which version a given user actually saw rather than which version is in the repository today.

The full API reference covers authentication, idempotency, batching and rate limits; pricing is per record with a monthly free allowance.

09How fines are actually calculated

Only three violations carry a direct administrative fine, and the list is not the one most readers expect:

Failing to label generative output is not directly fineable. Neither is failing to label content that is hard to distinguish from reality. Nor are the safety or high-impact duties. The route to a penalty for any of those runs: investigation, then a cease-or-correct order, then a fine only if you defy the order. And for a foreign operator, that fine is the fourth trigger for the domestic-representative obligation — failure of which is directly fineable at the top of the range.

Now the part that should decide how you keep records. The Decree's fine schedule adjusts the amounts on facts that are entirely about dates and durations:

• Up to half off where the violator is recognised as having made efforts to correct or resolve the violation — a claim you either can evidence with dated records or cannot.
• Up to half again where the state of violation lasted six months or more. Duration is the aggravator, so when it started and when it stopped is worth money.
• Repeat-offence escalation applies where a fine was imposed for the same violation within the preceding two years, measured from the date the fine was imposed to the date the same violation was next detected.

Every one of those adjustments turns on a provable date. The statute does not require tamper-evident records — we should not pretend it does — but it prices them.

11Questions

The fine cap is about twenty thousand US dollars. Why would anyone bother?

Because the fine is the weakest instrument in the Act. The real exposure is the cease-or-correct order, which can require you to change a live product; the mandatory public posting of your risk arrangements and the name of the person supervising the system; the procurement preference that favours operators who have run an impact assessment; and, for foreign operators, the conversion into a permanent domestic-representative obligation once you have been fined for defying an order.

Does the grace period cover the deepfake labelling duty?

The ministry's own statement says the transparency provisions are within the deferral of both investigation and fines. One widely-shared blog post claims that duty is carved out and enforced on detection; it cites nothing, and it is structurally doubtful because that duty carries no direct fine at all. We would follow the ministry statement, and note the disagreement rather than hide it.

We are outside Korea with no office there. Are we really in scope?

On the face of the Act, yes, if your conduct affects the domestic market or users — there is no establishment or targeting requirement. Whether you must appoint a domestic representative is a separate question with much higher thresholds. Being bound without owing a filing is the normal position for a mid-sized foreign operator here.

When does the five-year retention clock start?

The Decree does not say, and no notice resolves it. Treat it as five years from implementation of each measure, running independently per measure, and keep the implementation dates provable — which is the part that is in your control regardless of how the ambiguity is later settled.

Is this like the EU AI Act?

Structurally, no. Korea has no prohibited practices, no conformity assessment, no CE-style marking, and a flat fine cap instead of turnover-linked penalties; its impact assessment is a best-efforts duty rather than a mandate. The transparency duties are the part that rhymes. The EU page covers Article 50.

12Sources

Every article number, threshold and figure on this page was read from the Korean government's own statute database. English renderings are the government's official translations, which are published for reference only — the Korean original prevails.

• Primary Framework Act on AI — current consolidated Korean text Articles 2, 4, 31–36, 40 and 43: the definitions, the extraterritorial scope, the transparency duties, the high-impact measures, the domestic representative, the investigation power and the fine article.
• Primary Enforcement Decree — Presidential Decree No. 36053 Article 23 transparency methods and exceptions, Article 24 the three-part compute test, Article 27(2) the five-year retention rule, Article 29 the domestic-representative thresholds, Article 32 the fine schedule.
• Primary Decree Appendix 2 — the administrative fine schedule The per-violation amounts, the two-year repeat window measured to the date of next detection, the reduction for evidenced correction efforts, and the six-month duration aggravator.
• US International Trade Administration — South Korea AI Basic Act Corroborates the guidance period and the domestic-representative thresholds from a government source outside Korea.
• Future of Privacy Forum — analysis of the Framework Act On the breadth of the extraterritorial provision relative to the EU, and the overlap between this Act and Korea's personal-information regime.