South Korea's LG AI Research opened the newest version of its flagship AI model, K-EXAONE 2.5, to outside developers on Nov. 9. LG says developers, startups, companies and research institutes can use it at no cost to develop services and for research once they get a key on the lab's EXAONE platform. The platform's terms allow only non-commercial use: they bar using the model or its answers for commercial purposes or building it into products or services, and they let LG use what people send the model, and its replies, to train its AI unless they opt out. It is offered through an API, a connection that lets developers plug a service into their own apps.
K-EXAONE comes out of a government competition. South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT runs a project in which company-led teams build the country's own large AI models, which it calls sovereign AI. A news report says the aim is to reduce Korea's reliance on foreign AI. The ministry says LG's team was one of three to advance after the project's second round, held in the first half of 2026. It also says the teams released their models as open source, publishing the files so anyone can download them, and it lists LG's previous version, K-EXAONE 2.0, under the Apache 2.0 license, a license that lets anyone use, change and share it free of charge.
LG calls version 2.5 a test model, meant to try out new technology, made by giving its predecessor, released in August, more training. LG lists Korean and English as its languages, and it handles text only. It has 750 billion parameters, the numbers a model tunes as it learns, but switches on only about 31 billion of them at a time, a design that lets it run faster than its full size suggests.
LG says the model's strengths are coding and the work of AI agents, AI that can carry out tasks on its own, such as using apps and websites, instead of only answering questions. On four tests of that kind of work, run by LG itself, LG says it performed on par with two Chinese models of similar size, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and GLM-5.3, which LG calls among China's top models. On a test of finding information by searching the web, it scored 78.0 points, against 75.8 for DeepSeek's model and 79.0 for GLM-5.3. On a test of building and fixing real software, it scored 59.2 points, just ahead of DeepSeek's 58.4 and behind GLM-5.3's 64.0.
LG's platform says the service is currently free. Its terms say that if LG begins charging, it will post the fees on its website, but LG has not said whether or when that will happen. Its announcement of version 2.5 also does not say whether the model's files will be published for download, as the ministry says the teams did with earlier models.
Correction (Nov. 10): an earlier version said developers could build the model into their own services. LG's platform terms allow only non-commercial use and bar building it into products or services.