Executive Summary
- •North Korea’s AI development is accelerating and could supercharge state-backed crypto theft, a new INSS report warns.
- •Researchers found Pyongyang using prohibited NVIDIA RTX 2700 GPUs to support facial recognition, voice synthesis, and multi-object tracking projects.
- •Crypto hacks totalled $172.5 million in November 2025, and AI-powered attacks are expected to intensify.
Pyongyang’s AI Push Enters a Risky New Phase
North Korea has spent nearly three decades quietly building artificial intelligence capabilities that now risk supercharging its cyber-theft operations, according to a new assessment by South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS).
Researchers say Pyongyang’s AI programs have evolved significantly in recent years, supported by expanded research institutions and self-built algorithms, despite strict global sanctions limiting access to advanced hardware.
Banned NVIDIA GPUs Found in North Korea
One of the report’s most striking findings is the use of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2700 graphics cards, hardware that the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) strictly prohibits for export to North Korea.
INSS highlighted several 2025 studies from the National Academy of Sciences’ Mathematical Research Institute and Pyongyang Lee University. Their work spanned facial recognition, multi-object tracking, lightweight voice synthesis and accent identification.
AI Strengthens Pyongyang’s Cyber Arsenal
INSS officials warn that these capabilities have clear military and cybercrime applications. AI could help North Korea improve target identification, predict movement paths, disrupt command communications, and execute more believable social-engineering attacks.
Kim Min Jung, head of INSS’s Advanced Technology Strategy Centre, said “precise monitoring” of North Korea’s AI trajectory is urgently needed to prevent advanced technologies from being diverted into military or cyber operations.
The report adds that AI-driven tools could drastically increase North Korea’s capacity to generate deepfakes, evade detection systems, and automate crypto-theft strategies, allowing a small team to operate at near-industrial scale.
China-Russia Ties Could Accelerate Deployment
The analysis warns that deepening cooperation between North Korea, China, and Russia since the Ukraine conflict could smooth access to training data, hardware, and advanced AI systems, speeding up real-world deployment.
The warning comes as global crypto theft continues to grow. According to CertiK Alert, crypto losses in November 2025 reached $172.5 million, of which about $45.5 million was later frozen or recovered.
Meanwhile, South Korean investigators strongly suspect that North Korea’s state-backed Lazarus Group was responsible for the sophisticated $30.7 million cryptocurrency theft from the Upbit exchange on November 27.