South Korea’s annual military drill with US to go on, AI models to be deployed

South Korea will proceed with its annual military drill with the US next month and test its self-developed artificial intelligence models during the exercises.

Named Generative Defence AI, the system will be deployed at the Freedom Shield joint exercises, which are held to gauge the readiness of South Korean and US troops to deter North Korea’s aggression.

“[We] will look into how our self-developed generative AI can be applied to actual command and control systems during the exercise on a trial basis,” a spokesman for the South Korean defence ministry said on Tuesday, according to the Yonhap news agency.

No classified military secrets have been used to train the AI models. Instead, the system was designed based on general scenarios such as mobilisation, administrative support, and public affairs, public broadcaster KBS said in a report.

On Tuesday, South Korean acting president and acting prime minister Choi Sang-mok said during a cabinet meeting that Freedom Shield would proceed as planned. Choi took on the dual role following the impeachment of Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who himself served as acting president after President Yoon Suk-yeol was impeached last December.

Choi’s comments appear to address concerns that the drill would either be cancelled or scaled down given that US President Donald Trump has criticised the exercises as expensive.