AI Spera CEO Kang Byung-tak strongly criticized contractors' reliance on vibe coding following the hacking incident involving the "Moduui Changeop" startup support platform.

He said a growing number of contractors are using artificial intelligence-generated code without sufficient verification, creating new security risks.

Kang cited the Moduui Changeop hack at the AIDC Security Technology Workshop held Sept. 7 at Militopia Hotel by Marine in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. "The websites built by contractors are a mess beyond imagination," he said.

Moduui Changeop is a startup support program run by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups. In June, non-public information belonging to 5,000 successful applicants in the program's first cohort was leaked externally, including email addresses, evaluation comments and summaries of startup ideas.

A government investigation found that some of the platform's application programming interfaces (APIs) contained non-public information. The data leaked while the APIs were being collected externally through methods including web crawling. The data was encrypted, but the encryption key needed to decrypt it was also exposed.

An AI solutions company participating in the program obtained non-public email addresses through abnormal API calls and other means. Controversy grew after the company sent promotional emails to those addresses. It was later revealed that about a month before the incident, an external security team had discovered a similar API vulnerability and reported it to the Moduui Changeop operator.

"News coverage has largely focused on the contractor having carried out the hacking, but in my view both issues are serious," Kang said.

The "two issues" Kang referred to were the actions of the company that obtained the non-public information and the platform's own security flaws. He argued that the fundamental problem was that the platform had been designed to allow such access in the first place.

"The code written by the contractor looks to me like it was probably created through vibe coding," Kang said. "Security was not considered at all."

Vibe coding is a development method in which users describe desired functions in natural language and AI generates the necessary code and user interface (UI). "Vibe coding is certainly a whole new world, but in my view it is a ticking time bomb," Kang said. "I think it has increased contractor supply-chain risks by more than 100-fold."

"ChatGPT or Claude does a very good job when you use it for security checks," he said. "But after fixing the issues, some functions stop working. If you use vibe coding again to fix those functions, new vulnerabilities emerge." Most of those problems involve permissions, he added.

Kang outlined major security problems found in systems built by contractors, including cases where users are authenticated but authorization checks are not performed; databases are left directly accessible from outside without firewalls or access restrictions; and actual client data is uploaded unchanged to test and development servers without access control lists (ACLs).

Kang also disclosed examples of security problems involving companies and public institutions beyond Moduui Changeop.

One involved an AI chatbot that Kang identified as a system belonging to the Agency for Defense Development. "AI chatbot screens containing important defense-related data are exposed on the internet and can simply be accessed," he said. "It is not even a case of the ID and password being 'admin admin' — there is no authentication at all. It actually works when you submit prompts."

He also cited what he described as a system belonging to the Financial Security Institute. "Access tokens and refresh tokens are exposed on the site as JSON files," Kang said. "This does not really even require hacking." Access and refresh tokens function as credentials issued by a server after login. If exposed, they can allow access with the account's privileges without a password.

Kang also cited examples involving private companies. Referring to a system he described as an AI service from Starbucks, he said, "You can see all the content immediately without logging in, and you can submit prompts as well."

Regarding an AI system for credit assessment developed by Upstage, Kang said, "There is no login, so not only can you look through all this data and freely submit prompts, but you can also see the actual data inside." He said the issue was particularly serious because the system contained various types of data, including apartment purchase contracts.

Kang said the examples illustrate how the external attack surface that companies must manage is expanding significantly in the AI era. "When people talk about hacking AI, they mostly think of prompt injection or attacks on AI models," he said. "But rather than hacking the AI itself, targeting administrator pages is much easier to compromise and attack."

AI Spera is a cybersecurity company founded in 2017.

Attack Surface Management (ASM), whose importance Kang emphasized by disclosing security issues at multiple companies and institutions, is AI Spera's core business. Its flagship solution, Criminal IP, collects and analyzes internet-connected IP addresses and servers to identify externally exposed assets and security risks.

Autonomous driving AI company RideFlux has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with commercial vehicle maker Tata Daewoo Mobility to cooperate on Level 2+ (L2+) driver assistance systems for commercial vehicles and Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving.

Under the agreement, RideFlux’s software for five key highway driving functions will be installed on Tata Daewoo Mobility’s XEN and KUXEN heavy-duty truck platforms, with the companies pursuing mass production of L2+ driver assistance systems. Tata Daewoo Mobility will provide the vehicle platforms and vehicle control interfaces, while RideFlux will lead advance development of Driver Control Assistance System (DCAS) software compliant with the UN R171 international standard.

The L2+ driver assistance system integrates longitudinal and lateral vehicle control for functions including lane keeping, lane changing, highway junctions and merging, overtaking and tollgate passage. RideFlux expects to establish a data feedback loop that uses real-world driving data collected from vehicles after mass production to simultaneously improve L2+ performance and validate L4 technology.

The companies have also outlined a roadmap for fully driverless L4 commercialization. Building on what RideFlux said is Korea’s first paid freight transportation service using heavy-duty autonomous trucks, the company plans to develop robotruck conversions before moving to mass production of fully driverless L4 trucks.

The partnership also includes plans to establish a foothold in the global commercial vehicle market by linking the technology with the software-defined vehicle (SDV) architecture of Tata Motors, Tata Daewoo Mobility’s parent company and the largest commercial vehicle maker in India.

RideFlux said that following Korea’s first paid autonomous-truck freight service with Hanjin in July, supplying autonomous driving software to original equipment manufacturer (OEM) Tata Daewoo Mobility gives it a new business-to-business (B2B) revenue stream. The company said the deal also signals that the autonomous driving industry is moving from government-led demonstration projects, or B2G, toward commercialization, providing further momentum for its planned KOSDAQ initial public offering (IPO).

Nexon said on Sept. 7 that it successfully completed the first alpha test of “Mabinogi Eternity,” an engine replacement project for its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) “Mabinogi.”

The four-day test, held from Sept. 3-6, evaluated key gameplay flows based on user play, including early-game progression, combat and life-skill content.

On the first day, Executive Director Min Kyung-hoon communicated with users in real time through a livestream, explaining the purpose of the test and the project’s future development direction. He also detailed changes including improved gameplay convenience and life-skill tool items.

Nexon plans to further improve Mabinogi Eternity based on user gameplay patterns and survey results collected during the test.

LG Uplus is entering the prefabricated artificial intelligence (AI) data center business and has begun developing standard models. The strategy is aimed at shortening AI data center construction times to capture rapidly growing demand for AI infrastructure.

LG Uplus signed a memorandum of understanding with GS E&C, Xi C&A, Gansam Architects & Partners and D&O CM on Sept. 4 at its Pyeongchon Mega Center in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, to establish a prefabricated modular data center (PMDC) alliance.

PMDC involves designing data center structures, power systems and cooling equipment to standardized specifications, manufacturing them in factories and transporting them to construction sites for assembly. Conventionally, power and cooling equipment and servers are installed sequentially after the building is constructed. PMDC allows site construction and production of major equipment to proceed simultaneously.

The biggest benefit is shorter construction time. Building a data center involves more than constructing the facility itself. Power equipment including substations and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), cooling systems and piping must be installed and tested to ensure they operate properly together. PMDC moves much of this work to factories, where systems can be assembled and tested in advance, reducing on-site work largely to connecting modules.

Schneider Electric has said modular data centers can reduce deployment times by as much as 60%. Vertiv has said that carrying out factory fabrication and on-site construction simultaneously can save more than 40% of the time required for conventional data centers. LG Uplus, however, has not disclosed how much construction time its 100 MW model is expected to save.

Shorter construction periods can also allow data center operators to recover their investments sooner. If it takes three to four years to complete a data center after securing a customer contract, no revenue is generated during that period. Bringing operations forward by several months means rental and operating revenue can also begin that much sooner.

Another advantage is greater flexibility in adjusting investment to demand. Rather than building the entire capacity at once, operators can install only the modules initially required and add more as demand grows. With rapid generational changes in AI graphics processing units (GPUs) and related equipment, the approach can reduce the risk of excessive upfront investment. Factory integration and testing of power and cooling equipment can also reduce on-site rework and interoperability problems.

LG Uplus said in June that it would adopt the PMDC construction method at its Paju AI data center project. The latest agreement advances that plan to the development of actual standard models. The five companies have been reviewing since April both a new-build PMDC model for 100 MW hyperscale data centers and a retrofit model for converting existing buildings into AI data centers.

Under the agreement, the five companies will have clearly defined roles. LG Uplus will establish data center operating standards, technical requirements and business direction, and validate the models. GS E&C will handle construction and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) for new-build models. Xi C&A will be responsible for converting existing buildings and optimizing power and cooling systems, Gansam Architects & Partners will handle standardized design, and D&O CM will oversee project management.

SK Telecom and KT are also pursuing modular AI data centers. SK Telecom signed a three-way memorandum of understanding with Supermicro and Schneider Electric at MWC26 in Barcelona in March to develop an integrated solution that prefabricates power, cooling and IT infrastructure in modules for assembly on site.

KT Cloud said in its AI strategy unveiled in July that modular data centers, which use standardized modules for power, cooling and server environments that are assembled on site, can shorten construction times and simplify capacity expansion. KT Group plans to invest 6 trillion won in AI infrastructure over the next five years and build 1 gigawatt (GW) of AI data center capacity.

HP Printing Korea said on Sept. 7 that it has selected semiconductor design company Global Technology as its hardware engineering technical support partner for printing systems and signed a strategic partnership agreement. The companies plan to jointly advance electronic component and circuit development as well as artificial intelligence (AI) technologies while strengthening their technological competitiveness.

The two companies will collaborate on the design and development of electronic components and circuits and jointly develop AI-based technologies. Global Technology will also take full responsibility for hardware engineering technical support for HP Printing Korea’s research and development organization.

Global Technology will provide technical support throughout the product development process, including design changes and prototyping for printed circuit assemblies (PCAs). The company said it will operate an integrated technical support system based on its own engineering capabilities and a network of proven Korean partners.

The companies plan to gradually expand the scope of their partnership and jointly develop next-generation main controllers for printing systems, leveraging Global Technology’s system semiconductor and application design capabilities.

Smilegate said on Sept. 7 that it will begin PC pre-downloads for its new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), “ECLIPSE: The Awakening,” or ECLIPSE, at noon on Sept. 8.

Players can pre-download the game by downloading the STOVE client and then the game client from the official ECLIPSE website. Mobile pre-downloads will begin on Sept. 9.

ECLIPSE has surpassed 1 million pre-registrations ahead of its official launch. Smilegate will provide all pre-registered players with growth-support items, including a rare-grade weapon appearance summon ticket and transcendence summon ticket. To mark the 1 million milestone, the company will also provide 1 million gold and five transcendence summon tickets and five weapon appearance summon tickets.

ECLIPSE describes itself as an MMOLite that retains the core MMORPG elements of character progression and combat while reducing the burden of staying logged in and competing. Its artificial intelligence (AI) mode allows characters to continue progressing even when players are offline.

ECLIPSE will officially launch at noon on Sept. 10.

Leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies in the US and China have begun the process of going public.

Anthropic could launch its initial public offering (IPO) as early as October and list before the US midterm elections in November, Reuters reported. China's Moonshot AI has also reportedly filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO this year. The moves put leading frontier AI companies from both countries under direct scrutiny from capital markets.

According to Reuters, Anthropic plans to release its prospectus around late September for an IPO in mid-October. The timetable has been pushed back from an earlier expectation for a prospectus release in early September. IPO marketing is expected to begin in mid-October following the prospectus release.

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement for the IPO to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in June. The company said at the time that the number of shares and offering price had yet to be determined and that the listing would depend on market conditions and other factors.

Anthropic could seek a valuation of as much as $2 trillion in the IPO. That would be more than double the $965 billion valuation it received in its most recent funding round.

A $2 trillion valuation would put Anthropic's IPO close to the $2 trillion market capitalization of SpaceX, which went public in the first half of this year. It would effectively make the offering one of the world's largest IPOs. As of the Sept. 4 close, TSMC was valued at $1.98 trillion and SpaceX at $2 trillion.

Anthropic's potential $2 trillion valuation reflects its rapid growth, including its first quarterly profit in the second quarter and annual recurring revenue (ARR) of about $65 billion in July.

When Anthropic raised $30 billion in a Series G round in February at a $380 billion valuation, ARR stood at $14 billion. By its $65 billion Series H round in May, its valuation had reached $965 billion and ARR had surpassed $47 billion. ARR surged from $14 billion in February to $47 billion in May and $65 billion in July, driving up its revenue multiple.

The market expects Anthropic's ARR to reach about $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of this year. Reuters said the $2 trillion valuation is based to a significant degree on projections for revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028.

That pace of growth is widening the valuation gap with OpenAI, which is valued at $1 trillion. OpenAI had also considered going public this year but is pushing its IPO to 2027 or later so it can list when it can command a $1 trillion valuation, according to Bloomberg and the New York Times.

OpenAI is valued below Anthropic because its ARR cited in recent reports is about $40 billion. According to the Financial Times, Reuters and other reports, OpenAI's ARR stood at $21.4 billion at the end of last year, more than $25 billion at the end of February and about $40 billion in August. The market currently assigns greater potential to Anthropic's revenue scale and future growth prospects.

Anthropic is also preparing a $15 billion revolving credit facility ahead of the IPO. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks involved, according to Reuters. Anthropic is seeking a financial structure that combines equity raised through the IPO with a large credit line to support continued investment in computing infrastructure.

Anthropic's governance structure could also become a factor in the IPO. The company has a special body called the Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT), which has authority to appoint four of the seven members of its board. The structure is intended to prioritize AI safety and long-term public benefit over short-term profits.

Once Anthropic becomes a public company, shareholders are likely to demand higher valuations and improved profitability, potentially creating tension with the LTBT's focus on long-term safety and public benefit. The IPO will also test whether a governance structure designed around AI safety can be maintained at a publicly traded company valued in the trillions of dollars.

In China, which is competing with the US for AI leadership, Moonshot AI, developer of Kimi K3, is reportedly preparing to enter Hong Kong's capital market.

According to Reuters, Moonshot AI confidentially filed for an IPO with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sept. 3, targeting about $3 billion and potentially as much as $5 billion in proceeds. About three years after its founding, Moonshot is valued at roughly $50 billion. The timing of the IPO will depend on regulatory approval in China and market conditions. Moonshot has raised more than $5.5 billion from investors including Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, China Mobile, IDG Capital and HSG.

◇Moonshot AI, Developer of Kimi K3, Expected to Pursue Hong Kong IPO This Year

The most important technological asset in Moonshot AI's IPO is Kimi K3, unveiled in July. K3 is an open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters, making it one of the largest open-weight models. It combines performance competitive with US frontier models with an open-weight strategy.

While frontier AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI primarily use closed models to generate revenue from application programming interfaces (APIs) and enterprise services, Moonshot AI releases its model weights to expand its ecosystem and generates hosting and service revenue on top of it. K3 has also helped challenge the perception of Chinese AI models as lower-performance, low-cost alternatives.

Moonshot AI has recently been in talks with US cloud service providers (CSPs) over Kimi K3 services, potentially helping it address computing capacity constraints while strengthening its position as a global platform.

Within 48 hours of Kimi K3's launch, user traffic and API requests exceeded expectations, prompting Moonshot AI to temporarily suspend new paid subscriptions for individual users to maintain service stability for existing subscribers. The 2.8-trillion-parameter model rapidly strained GPU clusters and inference capacity, resulting in delayed API access and queues.

According to foreign media reports, Moonshot AI is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over cloud hosting and revenue sharing for Kimi K3. Moonshot AI is reportedly seeking as much as 30% of revenue from K3-related services.

The talks are still at an early stage and no outcome has been finalized, but an agreement could bolster Moonshot AI's Hong Kong listing. Rather than spending heavily to build its own global cloud infrastructure, the company could secure sustainable recurring revenue and a stable overseas cash cow by sharing revenue with US CSPs.

The negotiations are also reportedly subject to an annual commercial threshold of $20 million. Under the structure, companies or partners operating a Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) business that generate more than $20 million in annual revenue using K3 would be required to enter into a separate commercial agreement and formal revenue-sharing negotiations with Moonshot AI.

The arrangement would also carry broader significance for the AI industry. It would create a structure in which major US cloud providers host a frontier model developed by a Chinese AI company and share the resulting service revenue with that company.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is attracting Chinese AI companies seeking access to a broader pool of investment capital. With US restrictions on China and geopolitical uncertainty increasing, Hong Kong has emerged as a major alternative for raising global capital.

Foreign investors face strict restrictions on access to mainland Chinese stock markets in Shanghai and Beijing, while Hong Kong allows global institutional investors and international funds to participate more freely. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange's global liquidity pool is particularly attractive to AI companies that require large amounts of overseas capital.

Hong Kong's adherence to internationally recognized accounting and disclosure standards also provides overseas partners and investors with a more familiar governance structure. That is encouraging Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, which is pursuing revenue-sharing agreements with US CSPs and expansion of its global ecosystem, to seek Hong Kong listings.

Chinese AI companies including Z.AI and MiniMax have listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this year. According to London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) data, Hong Kong IPOs raised $41.2 billion through mid-August, up 142% from a year earlier. Reuters said Chinese technology companies have led the surge and that Moonshot AI restructured from an offshore entity into a mainland Chinese entity as part of preparations for its Hong Kong IPO.

Devsisters said on Sept. 7 that it began pre-registration on Sept. 4 for “CookieRun: Card Collection,” a Roblox game based on the trading card game (TCG) “CookieRun: Braverse Card Game.”

CookieRun: Card Collection is a Roblox-based random card generator (RCG) simulation game focused on collecting and upgrading cards. It combines random number generation (RNG) elements with the strategic collecting aspects of a TCG, allowing players to build and complete their own decks.

The project is being jointly developed by Devsisters and VerseWork, a Roblox-based user-generated content (UGC) developer. Through CookieRun: Card Collection, the companies aim to reach new users beyond physical cards and explore opportunities to expand the intellectual property (IP) ecosystem.

CookieRun: Card Collection, which supports Korean and English, is scheduled for a global launch on Oct. 10. Pre-registration is available through the CookieRun: Card Collection page on the Roblox platform.

Meta has launched its paid artificial intelligence (AI) coding service, Muse Code, marking the company’s entry into the developer market.

On Aug. 5, Meta unveiled its latest Muse Spark 1.2 model alongside Muse Code, an AI coding agent. Muse Spark 1.2 is an updated version of the previous model optimized for software development tasks. According to Meta, the model was trained with significantly increased compute resources and a broader range of training environments, improving its capabilities in code generation, complex debugging and codebase comprehension.

While Muse Spark is a general-purpose model, Muse Code is a standalone terminal-based AI coding agent tool. Meta said it trained Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code together. Muse Code, the company’s first AI coding agent, is powered by the latest Muse Spark 1.2 model and has been released in beta for macOS and Linux.

One notable aspect of the announcement was the complete absence of references to open source. The shift is unusual for Meta, which has positioned itself as a leading advocate of open AI ecosystems in recent years.

Whereas the company previously pursued indirect monetization through the expansion of the open ecosystem around its open-weight Llama models, Muse Code represents an attempt to generate revenue directly from an in-house business.

Meta highlighted several technical features of Muse Code, including autonomous development workflows, persistent asynchronous background agents and local event logs.

An autonomous workflow feature allows the system to handle planning, coding, testing and result verification in a single process after receiving a user request—a standard capability among advanced AI coding tools. However, persistent asynchronous background agents represent Meta's key strategic move as a late entrant to the AI coding market.

Persistent background agents distribute workloads across multiple AI agents operating simultaneously in the background during a development session. While most competing AI coding tools also support background agents, those systems typically create new helper agents for each task.

In contrast, Muse Code keeps specialized background agents continuously active (warm) throughout an entire session. According to Meta, maintaining agents in a warm state rather than creating them for individual tasks helps avoid redundant information gathering.

This feature could significantly address practical inefficiencies in code development, as creating a new sub-agent for every task forces the system to repeatedly reread the same files.

Under this feature, large-scale tasks are distributed and processed in parallel by sub-agents operating within isolated Git worktrees. This architecture preserves the advantages of parallel execution while preventing state contamination, such as file deletion or modification by other agents on the same files.

Generally, a Git repository has only one working directory, but a Git worktree is a Git feature that enables multiple separate directories—each checking out different branches—to share a single repository (.git history) simultaneously. Each sub-agent operates within its own worktree (an independent directory with an independent branch), ensuring physical isolation from file changes made by other agents. Once work is complete, branches can be merged sequentially, confining conflict management strictly to the integration phase.

Although the technology itself is not new, many products still process subtasks sequentially within a single worktree or rely on file locking and execution ordering for parallel processing. Adopting worktree isolation as a core architecture increases implementation complexity and cost, requiring branch creation and management, merge strategies, conflict handling and cleanup logic.

For that reason, technology media outlet VentureBeat praised Meta’s decision to offer the architecture as a built-in capability at the harness level, despite its relatively limited adoption across the industry.

Meta also highlighted its local event log system, which records model calls, tool usage, approvals and code edit histories to enable task resumption even after crashes. The append-only event log allows developers to replay their entire work history from start to finish to resume work following a failure. This substantially resolves operational issues and serves as a foundation for audit trails.

Overwrite-style event logs make it impossible to determine prior actions, the process taken to reach the current state, or pending tasks. In contrast, foreign media outlets have praised Muse Code's append-only event log system for preserving the entire history sequentially for reconstruction at any time. This forms the foundation for developer efficiency, operational problem-solving, failure recovery and root-cause analysis (RCA) audit trails.

However, Muse Code does have weaknesses. First, its initial release is restricted to a terminal interface. Competing products such as Anthropic’s Claude Code offer terminal, IDE, desktop and web interfaces, while OpenAI’s Codex is supported across CLI tools, IDE extensions and cloud services.

Meta also released benchmark results comparing Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code against competing AI models, including Grok 4.5, Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Terra and Gemini 3.6 Flash. The choice of comparison models sparked controversy, as Meta avoided top-tier models from competitors in favor of second-tier options.

According to Meta, Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code (harness) achieved a score of 82.9% on Terminal Bench 2.1, narrowly outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Terra and Codex at 81.8% and SpaceX (xAI)’s Grok 4.5 and Grok Build at 81.6%. However, it trailed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 and Claude Code, which scored 86.7%.

On the Deep SWE 1.1 benchmark, Muse Spark 1.2 ranked behind Claude Opus and OpenAI GPT-5.6 Terra. This drew criticism from the developer community, with some arguing that the system would show lower performance when compared against GPT-5.6 Sol.

AI tech news site Kingy AI further claimed that Meta’s reported benchmark scores were slightly higher than actual verified figures, publishing a side-by-side comparison between Meta’s claims and verified evaluation scores.

The timing of the announcement has also raised suspicion. Muse Code was unveiled less than a month after the release of Muse Spark 1.1. Observers interpret this as an attempt by Meta to regain momentum after Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 stole the spotlight with overwhelming performance immediately following the ambitious Muse Spark 1.1 launch.

Despite these concerns, Muse Code’s pricing structure is viewed as a major advantage that offsets doubts about its market positioning. Meta is attempting to compensate for its late entry into the coding tool market with an aggressive pricing policy.

Critics note that the pricing strategy is more disruptive than the technology itself. Under the Standard Tier, Muse Spark 1.2 API access for Muse Code costs $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with cached inputs priced at $0.15 per million tokens. Meta also pledged not to use prompts or generated outputs for model training.

A second pricing option, the Contributor Tier, is available at just $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens. In exchange, developers must allow Meta to use their code for future model training.

Financial pressure appears to be driving this aggressive pricing strategy. While Meta reported second-quarter revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28% year over year, operating income fell 8% to $18.8 billion, and operating margin declined from 43% a year earlier to 31%. Capital expenditures (CAPEX) reached $31.08 billion for the quarter alone, with full-year guidance reaching up to $145 billion.

Meanwhile, entering the developer market effectively means entering the enterprise market. Alexander Wang, chief AI officer (CAIO) of Meta Superintelligence Labs and head of Muse Code development, emphasized the product's enterprise capabilities, noting that requests for Zero Data Retention (ZDR) features have already begun arriving. Remarks from CAIO Alexander Wang suggest that ZDR is currently implemented in Muse Code as an optional capability available to enterprises upon request.

ZDR is an agreement where the AI service provider immediately deletes user inputs (prompts) and outputs (responses) from servers upon completion of API call processing, storing them in no form whatsoever. While the Standard Tier already includes a commitment not to use prompts and data for training, ZDR goes one step further.

Under standard tiers, logs are temporarily stored on servers for a set period before deletion, whereas ZDR prevents storage entirely from the outset, eliminating risks associated with data leaks, hacking or future legal disputes. This is essential for regulatory compliance and intellectual property (IP) protection, both of which are major hurdles for enterprise adoption of AI coding tools.

Organizations handling sensitive source code representing trade secrets or operating under strict legal requirements regarding data retention on third-party servers demand ZDR capabilities. Without ZDR, deployment in highly regulated industries remains difficult regardless of model performance, making the feature an essential requirement for AI models and coding tools targeting the enterprise market.

Kakao plans to introduce an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) service that can identify food-ordering intent within KakaoTalk conversations and connect users from menu recommendations to payment through a partnership with Coupang Eats.

The company disclosed during its second-quarter 2026 earnings conference call on Aug. 6 that it has signed an agent-to-agent (A2A) partnership agreement with Coupang Eats. Under the envisioned model, KakaoTalk’s on-device AI will analyze conversational context and user preferences to recommend menu items, while the Coupang Eats agent will handle ordering and payment functions.

The two companies are currently discussing implementation details. Beginning with food delivery, Kakao plans to expand its agentic AI ecosystem into other frequently used consumer services, including commerce, reservations, travel and payments.

KakaoTalk will incorporate the company’s on-device AI model, Kanana 2 1.3B, along with long-term memory technology. The system is designed to understand schedules and interests scattered across multiple conversations as a unified context and provide increasingly personalized services based on accumulated user behavior and preferences. Kakao plans to introduce related experiences gradually in the second half of the year and is targeting more than 10 million monthly active users (MAUs) for its AI services by year-end.

Kakao said it will focus its resources on AI services that directly interact with consumers rather than infrastructure businesses such as AI data centers, graphics processing units (GPUs) and cloud computing. The company believes large upfront investments and ongoing capital expenditures are required for AI infrastructure, while rapid technology refresh cycles for GPUs and AI servers make the long-term sustainability of current profitability uncertain.

As a result, Kakao intends to prioritize AI services at the user interface level rather than capital-intensive infrastructure investments. The company plans to strengthen its in-house capabilities across the AI value chain, from models to services, leveraging its strengths in business-to-consumer (B2C) platforms.

Kakao reported second-quarter revenue of 2.0985 trillion won and operating profit of 277.0 billion won, both record highs for a single quarter. The figures increased 9% and 36%, respectively, from a year earlier.

Revenue from the platform segment rose 17% year over year to 1.2303 trillion won. Talk Biz revenue reached 643.2 billion won, while advertising and subscription revenue hit a quarterly record of 399.9 billion won. Business messaging revenue and display advertising within KakaoTalk grew 20% and 28%, respectively.

Revenue from the content segment totaled 868.2 billion won, remaining broadly in line with the previous year. Music and media revenue increased, while story revenue declined 16%.

“Considering the direction of Kakao’s AI strategy and the speed of execution, we expect the foundation for AI mass adoption to be established by the end of this year and full-scale monetization to begin next year,” Chief Executive Officer Chung Shin-a said.

Kakao aims to increase the share of AI-related revenue within its Talk Biz segment to double-digit percentages by 2028 through transaction fees, subscriptions and AI-powered advertising, positioning AI as a key driver to reignite Talk Biz growth and serve as a major revenue source.

Kakao reported record quarterly revenue and operating profit for the second quarter, driven by continued growth across its platform businesses. Strong performance from Talk Biz, mobility and payments operations also strengthened the company’s financial capacity to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.

The company said on Aug. 6 that second-quarter revenue reached 2.10 trillion won, while operating profit rose to 277.0 billion won on a consolidated basis under Korean International Financial Reporting Standards (K-IFRS). The figures were up 9% and 36%, respectively, from a year earlier.

Revenue from the platform segment totaled 1.23 trillion won, an increase of 17% year over year. Within the segment, Talk Biz generated 643.2 billion won, accounting for 52% of platform revenue. Advertising and subscription revenue rose 14% from a year earlier to 399.9 billion won.

Business messaging revenue increased 20% as demand from advertisers in the financial sector expanded. Display advertising on KakaoTalk also grew 28%, supported by higher user engagement and the performance of new advertising products.

Talk Biz commerce revenue reached 243.2 billion won, up 10% from the same period last year. Combined gross merchandise value from services including Gift and Talk Deal increased 9% to 2.7 trillion won during the quarter. Self-purchase transactions through the Gift platform rose 39%.

Revenue from other platform businesses, including mobility and payments, climbed 22% year over year to 587.0 billion won. The mobility business benefited from growth in its core operations and last-mile logistics services. Kakao Pay posted record quarterly revenue and operating profit, supported by higher financial-service revenue and growth in payment and platform services.

Revenue from the content segment increased 1% from a year earlier to 868.2 billion won. Music revenue rose 8% to 558.4 billion won, while media revenue increased 5% to 99.1 billion won. Story revenue totaled 210.7 billion won.

Operating expenses rose 6% year over year to 1.82 trillion won.

Kakao said it plans to gradually introduce agentic AI services within KakaoTalk that connect everyday activities such as ordering, reservations and payments. The company will work with partners in commerce, reservations, travel and payments while expanding its ecosystem through its open platform, PlayMCP.

As an initial example, Kakao plans to establish an environment in which users can complete food ordering and payment directly within a KakaoTalk chat room through an agent-to-agent (A2A) partnership with Coupang Eats. The company said an on-device AI model will understand conversational context and seamlessly connect users to ordering and payment functions.

Canadian enterprise AI company Cohere held its first media briefing in South Korea on Aug. 5 at The Westin Josun Seoul, unveiling plans to make the country a key hub for its Asia-Pacific expansion. Frank O'Dowd, Chief Revenue and Commercial Officer, and Hugh Jang, President for Asia-Pacific, outlined the company's regional strategy.

O'Dowd said South Korea is the most dynamic and competitive AI market in the Asia-Pacific region, adding that success in Korea would provide a strong foundation for expansion into other regional markets. Based on that assessment, Cohere plans to establish a Korean subsidiary by the fourth quarter of this year and hire a double-digit number of technical and sales personnel. The company also plans to establish a separate legal entity in Japan and deepen cooperation with Fujitsu, while expanding support for public-sector customers in Singapore.

Cohere's business in South Korea has expanded through its partnership with LG CNS. The company described LG CNS as its first key partner in the market, helping localize Cohere's AI models and agentic AI platform for Korean language and industry requirements. Cohere said it plans to broaden its domestic ecosystem beyond LG CNS to include additional IT service providers and AI model companies.

Two themes stood out in Cohere's presentation. First, the company spent considerably more time discussing its AI agent platform, North, than its proprietary generative AI model family, Command. Second, it positioned sovereign AI as a core competitive advantage.

Cohere was originally known for developing the enterprise large language model (LLM) Command. Founded in 2019 with the goal of building generative AI for businesses, the company counts Aidan Gomez among its three co-founders. Gomez, formerly of Google Brain, was a co-author of the landmark 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture that underpins modern AI and LLMs.

From the outset, Cohere targeted enterprise customers. It launched API services for enterprise text generation and vector embeddings in 2021 and later developed Command in 2022. Until the launch of North in January last year, the company's primary focus was AI models. At its first Korean press event, however, the majority of the discussion centered on North, its AI workspace platform.

North is an enterprise AI agent platform that connects internal corporate data and business systems so AI agents can perform real-world work tasks. Combined with Cohere's Embed and Rerank engines, it enables retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based search across large volumes of enterprise data, including documents, emails, databases and wikis, allowing users to find relevant information and generate answers and reports. The platform also supports enterprise AI agents capable of autonomously planning and executing multi-step tasks and workflow automation.

When Cohere launched North early last year, it positioned the product as an enterprise alternative to Microsoft and Google. North competes directly with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Google Vertex AI Agent Builder.

All three platforms connect enterprise data such as documents, emails and presentation files with AI systems to create customized internal AI agents.

Microsoft Copilot Studio is tightly integrated with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, making it highly accessible for enterprises running Windows-based environments. Google Vertex AI Agent Builder allows organizations to build agents integrated with Google Workspace on Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.

In contrast, Cohere said North is not tied to any specific hyperscale cloud ecosystem and can be deployed across any cloud platform or internal infrastructure chosen by the customer. The company argues that this flexibility makes North particularly suitable for organizations that seek independence from large technology vendors and require stronger security controls and customization, especially in financial services and other highly regulated industries.

According to Cohere, the company has adhered to four principles since its founding: enterprise control of data, multi-cloud support, on-premises deployment capability, and strong security and privacy protection. Command and North can be deployed in public clouds, private cloud environments, customer-owned data centers, or air-gapped environments disconnected from the internet. The company cited this deployment flexibility as its primary differentiator and the foundation of its sovereign AI strategy.

Cohere argued that enterprises and government agencies should be able to maintain direct control over both their data and AI operating environments. The company said its ability to support AI deployment in private cloud and on-premises environments, in addition to public cloud infrastructure, enables customers to meet data sovereignty and security requirements.

According to international media reports including TechCrunch, overseas customers using North have adopted the platform's agent capabilities in on-premises environments to balance strict security requirements with business productivity gains. Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), for example, worked with Cohere to develop and deploy North for Banking, a dedicated platform tailored to financial services. All financial data remains within RBC's own data centers and is not transmitted to external cloud environments.

LG CNS is also cited as one of North's key early customers. Cohere and LG CNS signed a partnership agreement in March 2025, and Cohere later stated on its corporate blog that LG CNS had deployed North to validate the effectiveness of AI agents in large-scale enterprise environments. According to the company, the platform is being used as a foundation for secure, customized AI agent initiatives at Korean enterprises that are highly sensitive to data leakage risks and seek alternatives to dependence on major technology vendors.

Cohere also said North provides transparent citations to source documents and visibility into how responses are generated, allowing enterprises to trace AI-generated outputs. The company said these capabilities have made the platform particularly attractive to financial institutions and large enterprises where controlling hallucinations is critical.

O'Dowd said many organizations have adopted generative AI but have not achieved the return on investment they initially expected. Rather than relying on the largest available AI models, he said, companies should select models suited to specific business objectives and optimize both performance and cost.

As part of that strategy, Cohere said North supports not only the company's own Command models but also a range of third-party AI models. The company also emphasized that it charges customers based on the number of annual users rather than token consumption, making AI operating costs more predictable for enterprises.

Cohere's decision to place North ahead of Command appears to reflect a recognition that competing solely on model performance is no longer sufficient. When Command was first introduced, model-to-model performance competition was still a meaningful differentiator. Today, however, the company lacks a model that directly rivals the performance of OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude.

Instead, Cohere argues that enterprises should have broad freedom to choose the most appropriate models for their environments, including open-weight models, and describes that model choice as another component of sovereign AI. The message closely mirrors comments recently made by Palantir Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp.

In terms of market positioning, strategic direction and enterprise deployment scope, Cohere North sits between Palantir AIP and OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Work offerings. The distinctions among the three platforms, however, are becoming increasingly blurred.

OpenAI is expanding beyond AI assistants toward AI agent platforms and enterprise workflow automation, while Palantir is broadening AIP beyond operational automation into knowledge-worker functions such as document processing and natural-language interfaces. Cohere occupies a position that gives it opportunities to expand in both directions, but also leaves it exposed to competitive pressure from both sides.

Bigwave Robotics and Omron Electronics Korea have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to cooperate in the robotics business, aiming to establish a framework for deploying safe humanoid robots in industrial environments.

Bigwave said that while humanoid robot pilot projects are expanding, existing robot safety standards do not adequately account for characteristics such as bipedal locomotion and AI-based autonomous decision-making. As a result, the company said there is a growing need to integrate risk assessment and safety design from the earliest stages of humanoid robot deployment.

Under the agreement, Bigwave's humanoid robot supply and system integration capabilities will be combined with Omron Electronics Korea's industrial safety consulting and safety control technologies to establish new safety standards for humanoid robots.

The two companies plan to jointly manage the entire process, from identifying customer demand and proposing robot specifications to risk assessment, safety hardware design and installation, validation, and documentation. Bigwave will propose humanoid robots and systems tailored to customer manufacturing processes and oversee on-site integration.

Omron Electronics Korea will support risk assessments and Performance Level required (PLr) analysis based on ISO 12100 and ISO 13849-1 standards, as well as the deployment of safety solutions including safety programmable logic controllers (PLCs), emergency-stop switches, and laser scanners. When necessary, the company will also integrate safety hardware such as light curtains, which stop equipment operation when a worker enters a monitored area, and door switches to improve applicability in industrial settings.

Bigwave said customers will be able to receive robot supply, safety consulting, safety hardware deployment, validation documentation, and on-site implementation as part of a single project. To accelerate humanoid robot adoption in manufacturing and logistics facilities, the company will establish a demonstration environment for safety solutions at its data center, where the partners will conduct joint proof-of-concept (PoC) projects and field trials.

The companies also plan to standardize processes from initial consultation through on-site deployment and secure real-world implementation references through joint seminars and facility assessments.

AI platform company INFINIQ has begun developing an intelligent data processing technology that converts handwritten military logistics documents into AI-based digital data.

The company announced that it has completed the project kickoff for the development of an OCR-based intelligent data processing and structuring system for unstructured handwritten documents in the military logistics sector under the second round of the 2026 SME Technology Development Support Program. Delivery is scheduled for December.

The project's core objective is to automatically recognize unstructured logistics documents—including supply requisition forms, maintenance records and inventory status reports—using AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) and convert them into structured data that can be directly linked to the Defense Logistics Integrated Information System (DELIIS).

INFINIQ said most military logistics forms are currently handwritten and later re-entered manually by personnel, resulting in significant labor consumption and data-entry errors. The company added that conventional OCR solutions relying on external cloud APIs have limitations in accurately recognizing military-specific codes such as National Stock Numbers (NSNs) and unit abbreviations.

To address these challenges, INFINIQ plans to deploy a three-layer hybrid recognition engine combining precision OCR, visual language model (VLM)-based contextual understanding and ontology-based logical validation. OCR will recognize handwritten text and special codes, the VLM will correct misidentified content based on context, and the ontology layer will verify data consistency according to military logistics domain rules.

The company said the system is designed to achieve character recognition accuracy exceeding 95%, a character error rate (CER) below 5%, and processing times of less than five minutes per document. INFINIQ emphasized that the platform will operate independently within a fully isolated on-premises network without external internet connectivity, and will also incorporate a five-layer security framework that includes data encryption, role-based access control and automatic masking of personal information.

According to the company, the system will enable personnel currently assigned to manual data entry to focus on analytical and decision-making tasks while reducing data entry and verification time by more than 50%. The company added that the accumulated maintenance data could later be analyzed using time-series techniques to predict optimal maintenance schedules, which could reduce maintenance costs, prevent equipment failures and improve overall logistics operations.

To ensure technical completeness and domain relevance, the Korea Military Academy will participate as an advisory institution. The academy will provide development facilities and collaborate throughout the project on ontology design and validation.

INFINIQ also plans to integrate the structured logistics data generated by the project with its ontology-based decision support platform, AURON. Combined with AURON, the data can be searched and analyzed through semantic relationships linking maintenance histories and inventory status, and the platform can assess impact ranges and maintenance priorities based on relationships among equipment, units and supplies. The company said it ultimately plans to visualize the data through dashboards and expand the system into a military-specific AI platform that can be utilized across units, facilities and operational functions.

CJ ONE, the lifestyle membership platform operated by CJ OliveNetworks, is launching its August Wonder Series promotion in partnership with Mega MGC Coffee.

The company previously held the promotion with Tous Les Jours in July and will offer benefits through Mega MGC Coffee in August.

The August Wonder Series consists of Wonder Week with Mega MGC Coffee, Wonder Raffle on Aug. 11 and Wonder Quiz on Aug. 21.

Wonder Raffle will offer prize drawings, while Wonder Quiz will provide opportunities to earn CJ ONE points and benefits from major CJ brands.

From Aug. 1 to Aug. 5, CJ ONE is running a teaser event for Wonder Week. Members who sign up for event notifications through the CJ ONE app during the period will receive CJ ONE points.

The main Wonder Week event will run from Aug. 6 to Aug. 10.

During the event, all CJ ONE members can receive a 50% discount coupon for a Mega MGC Coffee iced Americano through the CJ ONE app at 10 a.m. each day.

Members who did not earn or redeem CJ ONE points at Mega MGC Coffee between Jan. 1 and July 31, 2026, will receive an additional 50% discount coupon if they make their first point transaction during the Wonder Week promotion.

Com2uS' upcoming MMORPG Zeus: The God of Arrogance (Zeus) and Smilegate's Eclipse: The Awakening (Eclipse) are set to face off in the market with launches just two weeks apart. While both games aim to reduce the fatigue associated with long play sessions in traditional MMORPGs, they differ significantly in their settings, competitive structures and character progression systems.

Published by Com2uS and developed by AButton, Zeus is scheduled for release on Aug. 26. Eclipse, published by Smilegate and developed by NPIXEL, is slated to launch on Sept. 10.

Zeus is built around a world inspired by Greek mythology. Rather than directly adapting familiar myths, the game reimagines the stories of Pandora, the Titans and the Olympian gods in a world fractured by the arrogance of Zeus, the king of the gods. Unreal Engine 5-powered graphics and a multilayered competitive structure are among its key features.

"Greek mythology is a story that virtually everyone knows, yet it has surprisingly rarely been explored properly in games," said Jung Sung-hoon, director at AButton. "We used that familiarity as a starting point while adding our own fresh elements. Many well-known gods will guide players into the world of the God of Arrogance, each with their own role."

In contrast, Eclipse adopts an original setting centered on the prosperous world of Ederion, blessed by the gods, and its hidden counterpart, Orthea. The game builds its own narrative around uncovering the truth concealed behind a seemingly perfect world.

"Stories based on well-known mythological elements often have predefined events, narratives and character frameworks," said Kim Dong-hyuk, chief art director at NPIXEL. "Rather than incorporating existing mythology, we felt it was important to create our own mythological details, which is why we chose an original story."

At the core of both games is the effort to reduce the burden of extended MMORPG play. However, Zeus focuses on improving convenience so that more players can participate in competition and progression, rather than reducing competitive elements themselves. Even while using AI-driven auto-play mode, players can access shops, trade items and manage equipment. A scheduling function also allows players to assign different hunting areas based on time periods.

The game also introduces an AI-powered "Persona" system designed to lower playtime requirements while preserving the appeal of competitive MMORPG gameplay. Personas are AI-controlled replicas generated in real time using a player's character specifications and appearance. Players can compete against these personas in one-on-one content such as the Colosseum and in large-scale guild-versus-guild RvR content known as the Arcadia Festival.

Eclipse, meanwhile, defines its approach as "MMO Lite." The concept aims to preserve the enjoyment of progression, cooperation and combat while reducing both time and spending requirements. Its flagship "Sanctuary" feature allows players to accumulate experience points and growth resources even while offline. The game also includes an AI mode that enables automated hunting during offline periods and a support feature called "Eclipse Time," which lets players choose their preferred play schedule.

The two titles also differ in their player-versus-player (PvP) philosophies. While Zeus emphasizes a multilayered competitive structure, Eclipse adopts optional PvP, giving players greater control over whether they participate in competitive content. Most areas are designated as safe zones, and large-scale battles are designed to be completed in shorter sessions. Combat strategies based on weapon selection and skill combinations further distinguish the game.

Both titles are strategically important to their publishers' MMORPG businesses. Zeus is Com2uS' flagship MMORPG release for the second half of the year and the first title from AButton. With The Starlight, released in 2025, falling short of expectations, industry observers are watching to see whether Zeus can become a new growth driver for the company's RPG business.

Eclipse is a new MMORPG jointly introduced by Smilegate and NPIXEL. As revenue from Lost Ark continues to stabilize at lower levels, the title is expected to play a key role in securing new revenue streams. Industry attention is also focused on how players will respond to the game's "MMO Lite" strategy, which seeks to maintain traditional MMORPG progression and competitive systems while reducing player burden.

By taking different approaches to easing MMORPG fatigue—Zeus through Greek mythology and competitive gameplay, and Eclipse through an original world and optional PvP—the two titles are poised to compete for different segments of the market. Their launches, separated by roughly two weeks, will be closely watched in the second half of the year.

Woowa Brothers, the operator of food delivery platform Baemin, said on Aug. 10 that it signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korea's Ministry of the Interior and Safety to promote the use of certified low-price businesses, known as Good Price Stores.

Good Price Stores are businesses recognized by the ministry and local governments for offering affordable prices, hygienic environments and friendly service, making them establishments that consumers are likely to revisit.

The agreement is intended to help ease the burden of inflation on consumers. Under the program, restaurant owners who have maintained affordable prices will gain additional opportunities to increase sales, while consumers will receive benefits through the Baemin platform.

From Aug. 17 through Sept. 13, customers will be able to receive delivery-only discount coupons worth 3,000 won for orders placed at participating Good Price Stores on a first-come, first-served basis.

Baemin will also support participating businesses by featuring them through banner promotions on the "Together Store" page within its mutual-growth program section on the platform.

Global AI audio research startup ElevenLabs has made its new dubbing model, Dubbing v2, available through its ElevenAPI platform, allowing developers to integrate the technology directly into their products and workflows. The model was first introduced through a user interface version in May and is now being offered via API access.

Unlike conventional dubbing systems that follow a speech recognition → translation → speech synthesis pipeline using cloned voices, Dubbing v2 employs a direct speech-to-speech (audio-to-audio) architecture. ElevenLabs said the model generates speech output directly from the source speech, enabling it to replicate the speaker's voice and more faithfully reflect the original's emotional expression and performance while producing natural multilingual dubbing.

The company also said the model is designed to align spoken dialogue naturally with video timing, improving synchronization accuracy. However, Dubbing v2 does not provide AI lip-sync processing for video content or real-time multilingual dubbing for live-streamed broadcasts. The model supports 92 languages, including Korean.

ElevenLabs said the primary target users for Dubbing v2 include content creators, media companies and global enterprises seeking to deliver high-quality content to international audiences.

The company added that professional film- and television-grade dubbing has traditionally cost hundreds of dollars per minute, whereas Dubbing v2 aims to provide high-quality dubbing at a more affordable price point.

MICUBE Solution, a provider of smart factory and autonomous manufacturing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, will build an AI autonomous manufacturing platform for cosmetics original development manufacturer (ODM) Cosmecca Korea.

The project is being carried out under the Ministry of SMEs and Startups' "AI Applied Product Rapid Commercialization Support Program," operated by the AI Innovation Promotion Team of the Korea Technology and Information Promotion Agency for SMEs (TIPA). MICUBE is one of the selected solution providers for the initiative.

MICUBE will develop five core AI solutions to be deployed at Cosmecca Korea's manufacturing facilities. The goal is to create an intelligent autonomous manufacturing environment spanning the entire cosmetics production process, from research and development to formulation, production and quality inspection.

The solutions include: an AI Multi-Vision Quality Inspection system that uses deep-learning-based image analysis to respond immediately to product diversification and process changes; a Recipe Generation AI system that analyzes body and skin information alongside raw material and ingredient data to recommend optimal cosmetic formulations and validate them in a virtual environment; a Similar Complaint Prevention AI system that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze historical quality and customer complaint data, predict potential defects and provide natural-language question-and-answer capabilities; a Generative AI Data Integration platform that connects data across R&D, production and quality processes to support real-time decision-making; and a Digital Twin-Based Autonomous Control system that combines virtual manufacturing environments with LLMs to optimize processes in real time while providing AI-generated control recommendations and decision rationales.

Regarding the Recipe Generation AI solution, MICUBE said it has already validated a mathematical structure-based optimization algorithm in the secondary battery industry, where it analyzes large numbers of raw material combinations to identify optimal formulations. The company plans to apply that technology to cosmetics recipe development. It added that it has carried out numerous AI projects in industries such as food and chemicals, where ingredient blending and recipe optimization are critical.

The project will be implemented over two years. During the first year, the companies will establish AI core models and data infrastructure. In the second year, they plan to enhance the AI models, conduct field validation and commercialize a customized autonomous manufacturing system. The companies also intend to expand deployment of the solutions to Cosmecca Korea's global production sites.

MICUBE said it aims to successfully demonstrate a cosmetics-focused AI integration framework that combines generative AI and digital twins through the project. The company plans to expand the framework as a standard AI transformation (AX) model for small and mid-sized manufacturers and broaden the application of its autonomous manufacturing solutions to industries including pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.

Webzen on Aug. 10 revealed the first gameplay visuals and details for its self-developed upcoming title, Project D1.

Project D1 is a command strategy role-playing game (RPG) being developed by Webzen Crevix, a subsidiary of Webzen, based on the intellectual property (IP) of the popular webtoon I Became the Tyrant of a Defense Game. The title is currently in development with a target launch in 2027.

The game recreates the world into which the protagonist of the original webtoon is summoned, using a dot-graphics-based "diorama pixel art" style. The technique combines 2D pixel art with three-dimensional spatial presentation.

The original webtoon's narrative has been adapted into a party-based combat system. The episodes and storylines involving the protagonist have been reinterpreted through party composition, tactical operations, character progression and command-based battles.

Webzen said it plans to disclose more detailed information about the game in the second half of this year.