Interior Ministry to Hold Contest Promoting the Use of AI Tools Developed by Public Officials

[Financial News]  A contest will be held to put AI tools developed by public officials themselves to use in actual administrative work. The key aim is to scale up AI development achievements, which have so far remained individual officials’ experiments, so that government agencies can use them jointly.
The Ministry of the Interior and Safety said on the 21st that it would accept entries for the “2026 Public AI Transformation Challenge” through the 11th of next month. The final round will take place at the Government Innovation Expo, held on November 25 at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province.
The contest focuses on evaluating the practicality of AI tools developed by public officials and introducing outstanding entries into real-world administrative settings. The aim is to improve administrative efficiency by having officials who understand the work develop the programs they need themselves, rather than relying on specialist software developers.
As “Vibe Coding”—creating programs by giving generative AI instructions in everyday language—has spread recently, public officials have also become more active in developing tools themselves. As of the 8th, 1,086 projects had been registered in the AI Government Lab Public Repository, with about 2,700 participants. However, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety says most development efforts remain at the individual-experiment stage and have not led to use at the agency level.
The contest is divided into three categories: the “AI Government Lab Championship,” “AI Mission” and “Independent AI Agent.”
The AI Government Lab Championship will evaluate AI tools designed to improve public services, make administrative work more efficient and solve social problems, among other aims. There are no restrictions on the form of the entries.
The AI Mission category focuses on reducing the burden of public officials’ day-to-day work. Participants can choose and develop one of three projects: “Work Handover Baton,” which supports work handovers; “General Affairs Assistant,” which helps with general administrative duties; and “Regulation Drafting and Revision Agent,” which assists with drafting and revising regulations.
The Independent AI Agent category uses domestically developed proprietary AI provided through the Ministry of the Interior and Safety’s internal work network. Participants create AI agents for work using only prompts, or commands, without any separate coding.
Eligible participants are public officials from central government ministries and local governments, as well as employees of public institutions. Teams that pass the preliminary round will present and demonstrate the tools they developed in the final round. A total of 23 awards will be given, including the President’s Award, the Prime Minister’s Award and the Minister of the Interior and Safety’s Award, with total prize money of 17.2 million won.
Hwang Gyu-cheol, head of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety’s AI Government Office, said, “Through this contest, we will provide full support for institutionalizing frontline public officials’ creative experiments as a government-wide public good and turning them into administrative innovation that citizens can experience.”

[email protected] Lee Bo-mi Reporter