South Korea's AI Framework Act: the Generative Content Labelling Duty

South Korea passed a comprehensive AI statute before almost anyone outside the EU, and the part of it that reaches a foreign product soonest is not the high-impact AI regime — it is a short transparency provision that says output generated by your system has to be identifiable as such.

Status and dates

The instrument is the Framework Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and the Establishment of a Foundation for Trust, usually rendered in English as the AI Framework Act or AI Basic Act. It was passed by the National Assembly in December 2024, promulgated in January 2025, and took effect one year after promulgation — 22 January 2026. It is in force now. The competent ministry is the Ministry of Science and ICT.

The statute is a framework in the literal sense: it sets duties at a level of generality that requires a Presidential Enforcement Decree to operate, and the Decree is where thresholds, formats and exemptions live. A page that describes the statute without saying which parts the Decree controls is describing half the obligation. Consolidated Korean law, including English translations where available, is published on the Korean Ministry of Government Legislation’s law portal, and ministry-level guidance is issued by the Ministry of Science and ICT.

The two labelling duties

The transparency article — Article 31 of the promulgated text — contains two distinct obligations that are commonly reported as one, and they have different triggers and different intensities.

• The general generative-output duty. A business providing a product or service based on generative AI must notify users that the product or service is based on generative AI, and must indicate that the output is generated by AI. This is a broad, low-intensity duty: it attaches to generative output as a class, not to output that deceives, and it is satisfied by an indication rather than by a robust technical mark.
• The realistic-output duty. Where the output is a virtual result that is difficult to distinguish from reality — the deepfake case, described by effect rather than by intent — the indication must be made in a way that users can clearly recognise. This is the heavier limb, and the phrase to notice is “clearly recognise”: it points at a visible, human-facing label, not only a metadata field.

The structural consequence is that a machine-readable manifest, on its own, is a poor fit for the second limb. A C2PA-style manifest addresses a machine reader; the Korean second limb addresses the user’s eye. If you are building one labelling implementation for several jurisdictions, this is the requirement that forces a visible-overlay path alongside the embedded one. The reverse is also true: an overlay alone is a poor fit for the EU’s machine-readable marking duty.

Who it reaches, including foreign providers

The Act contains an extraterritorial provision applying it to acts conducted abroad that affect the domestic market or domestic users. That is now a familiar drafting pattern — it mirrors the reasoning behind the AI Act’s extraterritorial scope — and it means a generative product with Korean users can be in scope without a Korean entity.

The Act also requires certain foreign operators above a threshold set by the Decree to designate a domestic representative, with duties including receiving communications from the ministry and cooperating with requests for materials. This is the provision that turns a notional obligation into an addressable one: it gives the regulator somebody in the jurisdiction to write to. If your product has meaningful Korean usage, the representative question is the first one to resolve, because the threshold and the representative’s duties are Decree matters and can be tightened without a new statute.

What the Enforcement Decree controls

Treat the following as Decree-governed rather than statutory, and check the current Decree text before designing to any of them:

• The form of the indication — whether a watermark, a visible label, metadata, or a combination satisfies each limb, and whether there is a prescribed placement or wording.
• Exemptions, including any carve-out for creative, artistic or clearly fictional output, which was a live drafting debate and is the kind of exception that typically lands in a decree rather than a statute.
• The thresholds for the domestic representative requirement, expressed in user numbers or revenue.
• The boundary of “high-impact AI”, which is a separate and much heavier regime in the same Act. Labelling is not that regime; do not let a summary conflate them.

Enforcement is administrative rather than criminal for the transparency duties: the ministry can order corrective action, and administrative fines are available with a statutory ceiling. The reported ceiling for violations of this class is modest by EU standards — measured in tens of millions of won rather than as a percentage of turnover — which shifts the real exposure from the fine to the corrective order and the publicity around it.

How it differs from the EU duty

Three differences matter operationally. First, the trigger: the Korean general duty attaches to generative output as a class, where Article 50(2) of the EU Regulation attaches to synthetic content with an assistive-editing carve-out — so ordinary editing features can be out of EU scope and still inside the Korean notification duty. Second, the party: the Korean duty is framed on the business providing the product or service, which collapses the EU’s careful provider-versus-deployer split that the provider and deployer roles page sets out. Third, the medium: the Korean second limb wants human recognisability, the EU duty wants machine detectability, and building only one of those leaves you exposed in the other jurisdiction.

If you are mapping a global labelling implementation, the useful exercise is to write the matrix by modality and by jurisdiction rather than by statute, because the same feature can be in scope in Seoul, out of scope in Brussels, and subject to a named-artefact duty in California all at once. China’s labelling measures add a fourth shape again — see the Chinese content labelling measures.