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 t