The National Assembly on Dec. 2 at a plenary session gave final approval to a total budget of 630.8 billion won for the 2026 Intellectual Property Office. The amount is up 74.2 billion won (13.3%) from a year earlier and 4.7 billion won more than the government's proposal of 626.1 billion won.
To support swift and accurate examinations, the Intellectual Property Office will sharply expand prior art searches and fully launch the development of artificial intelligence (AI)-based examination technology and the buildout of a next-generation examination system. It will seek qualitative improvements in examination capabilities and provide corporations with practical information such as patent systems and examination trends in major export markets in real time to support strategy building needed for overseas expansion.
The budget for prior art searches will rise by 9.1 billion won, from 42.2 billion won this year to 51.3 billion won next year, and the AI-based patent administration innovation project is expanded to 3.6 billion won. In addition, new projects will be launched for an ISP·BPR effort (1.1 billion won) to build a next-generation intellectual property administration system and for an overseas patent examination system analysis project (800 million won).
Programs that help corporations raise funds and expand overseas will also be greatly expanded. To enable corporations with innovative technologies to receive stable financial support by using patents as collateral, the budget for purchasing and utilizing collateral industrial property rights was increased significantly from 2.3 billion won to 15.5 billion won. The Global IP Star Corporations cultivation program, which provides comprehensive support for intellectual property strategies for small and midsize corporations preparing to go global, is expanded to 15.5 billion won, bolstering efforts to secure export competitiveness and foster unicorn corporations.
To accelerate the commercialization of high-quality patents, a new IP-based technology commercialization strategy support program will be introduced with an investment of 10 billion won, and the Everyone's Idea Contest program, which aims to link the public's creative ideas to solving policy and technology problems, was also increased to 6.3 billion won.
Active responses will also be pursued in intellectual property protection. To block damage to corporations from counterfeit and copycat products and to protect the image of K-brands, a program to respond to riding the Korean Wave (9.4 billion won) was newly established, and a program that uses AI technology to support counterfeit product determinations (2.9 billion won) will also be newly introduced. In addition, AI-based leakage prevention support (1.2 billion won) to prevent the outflow of trade secrets and core technologies and a foundation-building project (1 billion won) to systematically respond to lawsuits by overseas patent management companies (NPEs) were included in the budget for the first time.
With the budget now set, the Intellectual Property Office plans to quickly draw up detailed plans for each program and thoroughly prepare for budget execution to make policy effects visible early.