Korea’s sovereign wealth fund KIC, which manages 339 trillion won, faces controversy over use of Chinese AI models

[Financial News]  Questions have been raised about whether Korea Investment Corporation (KIC), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, should review its security framework after it emerged that the organization uses Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models internally. KIC manages national assets worth 339 trillion won.
On the 19th, according to materials submitted by KIC to Rep. Kang Min-guk of the People Power Party, a member of the National Assembly’s Finance and Economy Planning Committee, KIC is using two Chinese-made models internally—the Qwen3 hybrid reasoning model from China’s Alibaba and BGE-M3 from the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)—as well as two U.S.-made models, Meta’s Llama 3 and Google’s Gemma 3.
Qwen3 is reportedly the model KIC uses as its “language model” to understand documents and generate responses. Rep. Kang Min-gu’s office pointed out that the organization relies on Chinese-made models for all tasks involving its internal AI, including summarizing and translating documents, as well as handling internal rules and weekly reports in its groupware system and lawmakers’ inquiries in the National Assembly’s work management system.
BAAI, which developed BGE-M3, used as a search model, was placed on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s export control list on March 25 last year for supporting China’s military modernization. KIC integrated BGE-M3 into its internal AI on December 15 last year.
Since May 7 this year, KIC has provided an internal AI service to all 350 employees. KIC said it “considered factors such as accuracy, comprehension, reasoning, suitability for work and stability,” adding that “the limited hardware capacity, with only four graphics processing units (GPUs), was also a major factor in the decision.” It also said that “Qwen3 had an edge in terms of value for money and suitability for multilingual use in Asia.”
Meanwhile, KIC employees used ChatGPT 36,881 times last month, about 46 times the usage of the internal AI, which runs models including Chinese-made ones. Rep. Kang pointed out, “They considered performance and value for money, but the developers’ nationalities and whether they were subject to sanctions were not even criteria. While use of the internal AI fell to one-fifth, they tripled the equipment,” adding, “An institution handling critical national assets should naturally include security factors such as developers’ nationalities and sanctions status among its selection criteria.”
At the state audit of KIC scheduled for the 20th, the creation of a strategic investment account and the relocation of its headquarters to a regional location are expected to be key issues. Since KIC is set to make domestic investments for the first time since its establishment in 2005, its organizational restructuring to operate the strategic investment account and measures to ensure the independence of its decision-making are expected to come under close scrutiny.


[email protected] Jo Eun-hyo Reporter