LG AI Research opens K-EXAONE 2.5 API free of charge

LG AI Research, the artificial intelligence research division of the LG Group, has made its upgraded EXAONE 2.5 foundation model accessible to developers, startups, companies, and research institutions for free, unveiling a significant performance improvement of over 70 percent within a mere eight weeks. This announcement came during NVIDIA AI Day Seoul 2026, an event held at Coex in southern Seoul on Monday, 8th March 2026.

From 8th March 2026, developers, startups, companies, and research institutes can utilize the model in their services and research by obtaining an API key through LG's platform, docs.exaone.ai. K-EXAONE 2.5, a technology verification model, was created by applying further training to K-EXAONE 2.0, the second model developed by LG AI Research as part of the government's sovereign AI foundation model project. The project aims to foster domestically produced AI models, reducing Korea's dependency on foreign systems.

According to the company's tests on open datasets, K-EXAONE 2.5 has demonstrated performance comparable to leading Chinese open-weight models DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 (max) in agentic AI tasks. These tasks involve AI entities planning tasks and utilizing tools independently.