In a dramatic escalation of North Korea’s campaign against foreign influence, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled what he calls a “Digital Border Wall”, a sweeping national firewall aimed at blocking all artificial intelligence tools and content generated outside North Korean borders.
The announcement was made during a rare televised address to the Workers’ Party Central Committee, where Kim claimed that Western and South Korean AI platforms were attempting to “invade the minds” of North Korea’s youth.
“The imperialist West now wages war not with bombs, but with code,” Kim declared. “We will protect our ideological sovereignty. No AI born in Seoul, Tokyo, or Silicon Valley will be allowed to pollute the purity of our revolutionary spirit.”
The so-called Digital Border Wall will reportedly expand upon the existing “Kwangmyong” intranet by introducing deep content filters, real-time monitoring of all smart devices, and a complete block on any unauthorized device using natural language models or machine learning-based translation tools.
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North Korean officials have accused tools like ChatGPT, Google Translate, and Midjourney of “promoting capitalist values” and “distorting historical truth.” According to state-run media, violators of the new digital sovereignty laws could face up to 15 years in a labor camp for “technological treason.”
While no independent verification is possible due to the regime’s isolation, satellite analysts and defector groups suggest that North Korea has recently invested in advanced Chinese surveillance systems and even begun developing its own state-controlled AI chatbot modeled after Kim Il-sung’s writings.
South Korean officials have condemned the move, calling it “a digital iron curtain that seals 25 million people from truth and progress.”
International tech rights organizations warned that the Digital Border Wall represents one of the most aggressive acts of digital censorship in modern history.
“This is not just about firewalls,” said Clara Ng, director of the Global Internet Freedom Alliance. “North Korea is building a mental prison one algorithm at a time.”
Despite the crackdown, defectors and underground activists vow to continue smuggling in banned devices loaded with offline AI tools to help educate the next generation of North Koreans about the outside world.
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