Asia Defense | Security | East Asia

North Korea’s Risky Bet on Military AI

Integrating AI into the North Korean military comes with risks, from technological vulnerabilities to the potential for an inadvertent nuclear war.

North Korea for the first time emphasized the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the Korean People’s Army (KPA) in the recent Workers’ Party of Korea Congress. The announcement made official the country’s plan to have each service in the KPA – including the Army, Navy, Air Force, Army Special Operations Forces, and Strategic Force – modernize their forces and battle plans using AI.

North Korea has long perceived AI to be a force multiplier. AI can assess a great amount of intelligence data to predict results, and it can improve those predictions so long as it is trained on high-quality data. North Korea’s notorious cyber forces can train AI for military purposes. However, integrating AI into the KPA will prove to be a risky bet, not only because of technological barriers to general adoption across all branches of service but also of the risk of an inadvertent nuclear war.

Developing AI requires a great number of graphics-processing units (GPUs), the data centers for intensive training, the electricity to power those centers, and the human resources to evaluate the inputs and outputs. While North Korea does not have a human resources problem, it does have difficulty with procuring hardware and electricity. Export controls on advanced GPUs prevent Pyongyang from procuring enough of them for large-scale AI training despite some smuggling efforts. The country’s electricity output in 2024 was only 4.2 percent of South Korea’s, which is not enough to power the data centers. 

Even the quality of the training data is doubtful. North Korea is likely to use battlefield data from Russia’s war against Ukraine to train its AI for target identification, obstacle detection, and facial recognition. The goal is to accelerate the kill chain and the accuracy of AI-enabled unmanned systems. However, the Russia-Ukraine War is largely a land war, which limits the usefulness of the data to the North Korean army. The air force, the navy, and nuclear force will have to train the AI on simulations. While simulations allow for dynamic training, they are not battle tested and can malfunction when encountering even small data deviations. 

On paper, AI can resolve the problem of human bias in decision-making, but humans determine the kind of data and method that AI is trained on, as well as what data outputs are appropriate. Using AI data from the Russia-Ukraine War means that the KPA’s experience will be heavily skewed toward Ukraine-like battle scenarios that feature trench warfare and low-level standoffs due to Ukraine’s huge strategic depth. This is different from the total-war scenario that many wargames for Korea have shown, due to Seoul being only 50 kilometers away from the inter-Korean border. 

The amount of training data available also depends on how much Russia is willing to share. North Korea’s limited number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets will constrain the quality and quantity of training data, which further exacerbates the selection bias.

Still, a flawed integration of AI into the conventional doctrine will not be as risky as its integration with North Korea’s nuclear doctrine due to the great level of destruction and the short amount of time decisionmakers have between detecting a threat and launching a nuclear weapon.

North Korea currently adopts an asymmetric escalation strategy, which includes the threat of first use of nuclear weapons against both nuclear and conventional threats and a........

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