Emulating Brussels but Recalibrating in Seoul: Challenges in South Korea's AI Framework Act

Abstract

This paper examines the pathway of South Korea’s AI Framework Act (“AIFA”), which became the world’s first fully implemented horizontal AI regulatory regime on January 22, 2026.  While the United States and other leading innovators have largely pursued sectoral or context-specific AI regulatory frameworks, the AIFA initially moved toward an EU-style horizontal framework. This was driven by the institutional incentives from the leading regulatory agency and the political clout of citizen activist organizations.

However, the rapid acceleration of AI adoption, a global shift toward “light-touch” governance, and Seoul’s “AI G3” agenda called for a strategic recalibration to mitigate regulatory overlap and unnecessary compliance burdens. Instead of amending the primary statute, the regulator used administrative rulemaking to alter the underlying logic of the regime. This pivot shifted the AIFA away from a safety-centric structure designed to protect “affected persons” from developers and deployers into a quasi-utility regime to shield “users” (including downstream deployers) from providers and distributors.

While this change narrowed the scope of application of the AIFA, it misaligned accountability across the AI value chain and pushed developers to protect sophisticated deployers who often wield substantial operational control. In response, the Presidential Council on National AI Strategy (“AISC”) has mandated legislative amendments in the National AI Action Plan to rectify these structural flaws.

By examining unresolved tensions in the AIFA and the rationale behind the AISC mandate, this paper suggests an alternative framework that balances context-specific and horizontal approaches. Furthermore, it offers three lessons for jurisdictions that are modeling legislation after the EU’s horizontal approach with less stringency: (i) even within streamlined rules, the differences between actors in the AI value chain must remain legally distinct; (ii) scalability is best achieved through taking up international industry standards rather than ambiguating legal duties or covered entities; (iii) the regulatory structure must decouple the rules for the underlying AI systems and regulations for AI-enabled products and services.