LG AI Research opens K-EXAONE 2.5 API free of charge
A promotional image of LG AI Research's K-EXAONE 2.5 platform / Courtesy of LG AI Research
LG AI Research, the artificial intelligence (AI) research arm of LG Group, opened the application programming interface (API) for its upgraded EXAONE 2.5 foundation model free of charge, reporting a performance boost of over 70 percent in just eight weeks.
The company announced the move at NVIDIA AI Day Seoul 2026, held at Coex in southern Seoul on Monday. Starting the same day, developers, startups, companies and research institutes can use the model in their services and research at no cost by obtaining an API key through the company’s platform, docs.exaone.ai.
K-EXAONE 2.5 is a technology verification model built by applying additional training to K-EXAONE 2.0, the second model LG AI Research developed under the government’s sovereign AI foundation model project, which aims to build homegrown AI models that reduce Korea’s reliance on foreign systems.
According to the company’s own tests on open datasets, K-EXAONE 2.5 performed on par with leading Chinese open-weight models DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 (max) in agentic AI, in which AI plans tasks and uses tools on its own to complete real work.
It scored 74.6 on AutomationBench, which measures task automation using software-as-a-service tools, compared with 74.9 for DeepSeek and 71.6 for GLM. On Claw-Eval, BrowseComp and SWE-Bench Pro, which test workplace problem-solving, web browsing and software development, it scored 77.3, 78.0 and 59.2, respectively.
“Internal analysis showed that overall performance across 24 benchmarks improved by more than 70 percent compared with the model released in July,” said Kim Yi-reun, head of the EXAONE Lab.
The company is also reviewing the use of NVIDIA’s Dynamo technology to improve inference efficiency.
LG AI Research plans to apply the training techniques validated through K-EXAONE 2.5 to its third-round model.
“We will focus on completing an EXAONE model with frontier-level performance by January next year,” said Lim Woo-hyung, co-head of LG AI Research.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.