From Security to Silicon: Building a Trusted U.S.-Korea Tech Alliance

More than sixty years ago, when South Korea was still rebuilding from war, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Park Chung-hee made a consequential bet: that investing together in science, engineering, and human talent could create shared prosperity. The United States sent leading scientific and industrial experts to Seoul and helped establish the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), not as a long-term commitment of taxpayer dollars, but as a foundation from which Korea could build its own industrial and technological strength. It was an act of trust: that Korea would take American help and turn it into strength of its own.  

That wager succeeded beyond what either country could have imagined. Today, Korea is not an aid recipient but one of America’s most capable technology, manufacturing, and investment partners. Bilateral goods and services trade reached nearly $240 billion in 2024, while Korean companies are making major investments in American semiconductors, shipbuilding, energy, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and advanced manufacturing. That trust, earned over decades, is now the foundation on which the two allies build.

The U.S.–ROK Technology Prosperity Deal is the modern expression of that same trust. Where the original partnership helped create one institution, today’s partnership seeks to connect entire innovation ecosystems—joint research, trusted AI infrastructure, full-stack technology exports, research security, 6G, biotechnology, quantum science, space, and STEM exchanges. It even envisions the United States and Korea taking trusted AI technologies together into markets across Asia and beyond.

That history should also shape how we approach moments of genuine friction.

Today, the United States and Korea are engaged in a difficult dispute over the treatment of Coupang, a U.S.-listed and Seattle-based company which was fined roughly $423 million by South Korean regulators following a customer-data breach. A U.S. congressional report has alleged the company was subjected to discriminatory enforcement and disproportionately severe penalties, while the Korean government rejects that characterization and maintains its actions were lawful, nationality-neutral, and necessary to protect Korean consumers.

Those competing claims deserve a serious, fact-based review. Korea has both the right and the responsibility to enforce its laws and protect its citizens, and American companies operating abroad must be held accountable when they fail to meet legitimate and fair standards. At the same time, our economic partnership depends on regulation being transparent, proportionate, consistently applied, and free from discrimination.

Both Washington and Seoul can smooth the regulatory hurdles that keep their companies from competing fairly in each other’s markets. For the United States, three opportunities stand out:

• Talent mobility: Create a dedicated, professional-visa (E-4) granting up to 15,000 Korean professionals a year the right to work in the U.S., in line with the access granted to FTA partners like Australia and Singapore. Establishing this channel both signals long-term trust and will help Korea deliver on its $350 billion investment pledge.

  
  

• Predictable export controls: Provide aligned chipmakers like Samsung and SK hynix durable, multi-year commitments. Until the end of 2025, their "validated end user" status let them equip their fabs without case-by-case approval; replacing it with year-to-year licenses injects uncertainty that could complicate building joint semiconductor supply chains.

  
  

• Shipbuilding: Keep expanding the allied repair-and-maintenance work U.S. law already permits, before tackling the harder goal of building ships side by side. Hanwha Ocean became the first Korean yard to overhaul a U.S. Navy vessel in 2025 and has committed billions to Pennsylvania’s Philly Shipyard.

On the Korean side, the work is less about opening sectors than about how digital rules are designed — so trusted firms can scale. Three areas stand out:

• Smarter platform rules: Seoul wisely shelved its Platform Competition Promotion Act in 2024 — a bill modeled on Europe's Digital Markets Act, whereby regulators could fine a "gatekeeper" up to 10 percent of global revenue. Related ideas persist, however. Korea's antitrust regulator is moving to raise penalties for abuse of dominance from 6 to 8 percent of domestic revenue, and a separate Online Platform Fairness Act would impose subjective criteria on digital platforms. Rules that treat scale itself as suspect raise costs and harm the small businesses and their workers they are meant to protect. 

  
  

• Open data and cloud rules: Rules that wall off the market hold back the collaboration both sides want. High-precision map data export is effectively barred — USTR calls it “discrimination” — while domestic firms keep the advantage. CSAP cloud-localization rules keep trusted allied providers out of the public market, and “sender-pays” network fees remain a global outlier. Mutual recognition of trusted-ally standards with security conditions like blurring sensitive sites would meet legitimate concerns without permanent exclusion.

  
  

• A level playing field: Seoul should keep closing the gaps that let offshore, untrusted vendors operate beyond the reach of Korea's rules. Because these players ship direct from abroad with little to no local incorporation, staff, or assets, regulators struggle to audit them, order fixes, or collect fines.   In turn, the heaviest obligations fall on the trusted firms operating inside Korea, while lightly regulated rivals take market share. Korea's move to require large foreign platforms to appoint local representatives shows its instinct to favor trusted partners.

The larger lesson of the KIST story is not that close allies will never disagree. It is that they should possess enough trust—and enough confidence in the value of their shared future—to resolve disagreements without allowing them to harden into broader economic or diplomatic estrangement.

The Coupang dispute should therefore be treated neither as an isolated corporate complaint nor as a referendum on the entire alliance. It is a test of whether two mature partners can protect consumers, uphold the rule of law, ensure fair treatment for one another’s companies, and preserve the climate of reciprocal trust needed for the much larger agenda before us—from semiconductors and shipbuilding to artificial intelligence, biotechnology, energy, and secure supply chains. The forthcoming Global Trusted Tech Standard (xGTT), developed by the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue, could give the United States and Korea a common, practical benchmark for building trusted technology together.

We should be candid where concerns exist, disciplined about the facts, and focused on a constructive resolution. The objective is not to excuse misconduct or constrain legitimate regulation, but to ensure that today’s dispute does not undermine the trust required to build the next generation of U.S.–Korea technological and economic cooperation. The same trust that built KIST six decades ago can, if both sides tend it, carry the alliance to lead the world's trusted technology economy.