A 25 country Pew survey found just 16% of South Koreans are more worried than excited about AI, the lowest share anywhere, against 50% of Americans. That gap is the product of a deliberate national design.
South Korea is the only country in a 25-nation Pew survey where more people say they are excited about artificial intelligence than worried. The gap is unusually wide. Just 16% of South Koreans told Pew they are more concerned than excited about AI, the smallest share in the survey, against 50% of Americans who said the same. That enthusiasm did not emerge from a culture that simply trusts new tools. It was built, over decades, by a state that treats technological leadership as a national project and asks the public to keep up.
The Korean government is now running that project at full speed. President Lee Jae-myung, who took office in 2025, has pledged to make South Korea a "top three AI power" alongside the United States and China and has launched a Presidential Council on National AI Strategy and a sovereign AI foundation model funding program. The legal scaffolding is already in place: the 2024 AI Basic Act was one of the world's first comprehensive AI laws, and it tilted decisively toward development with light-touch regulation. Surveys by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry now show a majority of Koreans using AI every day for personal-assistant or work tasks. South Korea ranks third in the world in number of notable AI models in the Stanford 2026 AI Index, and 70% of South Koreans told Stanford they would rather advance science and medicine through AI than protect existing industries from it.
The pattern has deep roots. From the 1970s steel and shipbuilding push, through the 1980s semiconductor build-out, the 1990s broadband rollout and the 2000s smartphone era, Seoul has run technology upgrading as industrial policy, not as consumer choice. The result is a domestic supply chain in which Samsung and SK Hynix supply most of the high-bandwidth memory chips that power Nvidia's AI training hardware. When Samsung's AI-chip rally pushed the Kospi to a record in May 2026 and carried the company past a $1 trillion valuation, the line between national strategy and household portfolio got thinner than in almost any other rich democracy.
Chihyung Jeon, a KAIST professor of science and technology policy, traces today's optimism to a long-running government narrative positioning AI as the engine of a "Fourth Industrial Revolution". That framing has been load-bearing for a decade. It is also why the policy failures of the past year sting so visibly.
The 2025 rollout of AI-powered textbooks in schools is the clearest case. The system was pushed into classrooms before a real pilot, produced factual errors, and exposed student data to privacy risks, and parents pushed back hard. The backlash did not derail the policy. It reset the rollout. A reported plan, described by MIT Technology Review, to deploy Atlas humanoid robots in Hyundai car factories drew an even sharper response from labor: a union statement declared that "without labor-management agreement, not a single robot using new technology will be allowed to enter the workplace." Neither episode has shifted the public's overall enthusiasm. Korea's AI mood is sticky because the institutions behind it keep moving.
The design has limits the data also surfaces. 64% of South Koreans still fear AI will displace human labor and worsen inequality, even as 52% believe it can lift productivity. The optimism is real, and so is the anxiety underneath it. That tension is most visible among the young. A Korea Gallup survey found 46% of South Koreans in their 20s have used a chatbot to read their fortunes, or saju, a traditional practice that has become a coping ritual for an underemployed cohort priced out of marriage and homeownership and tagged the "resting generation." AI is doing more than running a factory floor. It is also reading the future for a generation that has been told to wait.
The question the Korean experiment puts on the table for the United States, Europe, and the rest of Asia is whether top-down technology governance can produce durable public buy-in, or whether it just defers the reckoning. Seoul has decided that the answer is yes, and the institutions, the stock market, and the polling are lined up behind that bet. Whether the same design can survive the next labor dispute, the next textbook scandal, and the next generation of young Koreans who would rather consult a chatbot than a fortune teller is the part the strategy has not yet answered.