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🇰🇷South Korea · Mixed · 0 models
upstage✓
Upstage is a South Korean AI company — incorporated and headquartered in South Korea with a US subsidiary but no US parent — placing the Korean entity outside direct CLOUD Act and FISA Section 702 exposure. Its privacy policy (last revised May 21, 2026) is governed primarily by South Korean law with EU/EEA supplemental provisions, and the website implements GDPR-style opt-in cookie consent; however, no publicly available Data Processing Agreement, confirmed EU Data Protection Officer contact, independently audited GDPR certification, or stated EU data-transfer mechanism has been found. As a provider of general-purpose AI models actively marketed to EU customers, Upstage is subject to EU AI Act Article 53 GPAI obligations (in force August 2025), but has not published a compliance statement, signed the GPAI Code of Practice, or released a formal training-data summary — gaps that become enforceable from August 2, 2026.
AI Act 71/100Outside CLOUD ActHF verified
Stav AI Act verdict
compliancehigh
No EU AI Act GPAI compliance statement, no Code of Practice participation, and no published GPAI training data summary in the EU Office template format. GPAI obligations have been in force since August 2, 2025; Commission enforcement powers including fines up to 3% of global turnover activate August 2, 2026 — approximately 7–8 weeks away. Non-signatories to the Code of Practice must self-demonstrate compliance to the AI Office. Upstage is an active provider of Solar Pro and Solar Mini GPAI models to EU markets and is subject to Article 53 obligations.
privacymedium
No publicly available Data Processing Agreement (DPA), no confirmed EU Data Protection Officer (DPO) contact, and no independently audited GDPR certification. The privacy policy (May 21, 2026) is primarily governed by South Korean law with EU/EEA supplemental provisions, but the cross-border transfer mechanism for EU-to-Korea data flows is unspecified. These are material gaps for GDPR-regulated EU enterprise deployments.
securitymedium
No SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, or equivalent security certifications publicly confirmed. No bug bounty programme or formal vulnerability disclosure policy found. These are standard baseline requirements for regulated-sector (finance, healthcare, government) AI provider procurement in Europe.
governancemedium
Korea's National Growth Fund took a direct equity stake in Upstage in May 2026 as part of the Sovereign AI Foundation Model programme. Upstage also holds a Korean government procurement approval for public-sector AI and leads the MSIT-sponsored AI sovereignty consortium. While South Korea is a democratic ally, direct government equity ownership and programme mandates create a governance dependency that sovereignty-sensitive EU customers (government, defence, critical infrastructure) should evaluate.
jurisdictionlow
Upstage operates a US subsidiary (Upstage AI, Inc., California) with its own US CEO and North American commercial operations. If EU customer data is routed through or processed by the US entity, CLOUD Act and FISA Section 702 exposure for that entity's operations would apply. EU customers should confirm which legal entity processes their data in API service agreements.
Stav AI Act assessment
Editorial assessment, not legal advice. Stav's risk ratings, scores, and verdicts are our own analysis of publicly available information and may be incomplete or out of date. Verify independently before making compliance or procurement decisions.
Safeguards in place
- transparencyUnknown
Actively maintained privacy policy (last revised May 21, 2026) with detailed tabulated data retention schedules, EU/EEA supplemental provisions, and GDPR-compliant opt-in cookie consent — all ad/analytics storage denied by default pending user consent. Website confirmed republished June 11, 2026.
- transparencyUnknown
Solar-Open-100B model card on HuggingFace discloses training scale (19.7 trillion tokens, 102B/12B MoE architecture) and links to a public technical report (arXiv:2601.07022), providing meaningful technical documentation for the open-weight model family.
- transparencyUnknown
During the January 2026 plagiarism dispute, CEO Sung-hoon Kim proactively convened a public verification session within 24 hours, presenting internal training logs, W&B experiment records, and checkpoints. Independent NYU analysis confirmed correlation of only 0.0054. Government MSIT evaluation subsequently validated full training independence.
- complianceUnknown
Not CLOUD Act exposed at the parent level: Upstage is incorporated and headquartered in South Korea with no US parent entity. US investors (AWS, AMD) hold minority stakes only and do not create parental CLOUD Act or FISA Section 702 exposure for the Korean entity.
- communityUnknown
Named to the CB Insights AI 100 (2025), InsurTech 50, and FinTech 100 lists. Solar Pro 2 ranked in the top 10 frontier models globally by Artificial Analysis in 2025 — the only Korean model on the list. Prior 1st-place ranking on HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard for SOLAR-10.7B.
- stabilityUnknown
Broad and strategically credible investor base (Korea Development Bank, AWS, AMD, SoftBank Ventures Asia, SK Networks, Korean National Growth Fund) providing capital and infrastructure alignment. Active IPO preparations signal strong organisational continuity expectations.
Privacy posture
- Privacy policy
- https://www.upstage.ai/privacy-policy
- Flagged issues
- 1
- No publicly available Data Processing Agreement (DPA), no confirmed EU Data Protection Officer (DPO) contact, and no independently audited GDPR certification. The privacy policy (May 21, 2026) is primarily governed by South Korean law with EU/EEA supplemental provisions, but the cross-border transfer mechanism for EU-to-Korea data flows is unspecified. These are material gaps for GDPR-regulated EU enterprise deployments.medium
Privacy policy review
Identity & profile
- Country
- 🇰🇷 South Korea
- Open-weights policy
- Mixed
- Models in catalogue
- 0
- Website
- https://www.upstage.ai
- HuggingFace
- upstage · Verified · 821 followers
- HF published
- 22 models · 5 datasets · 2 papers
Creator profile
About upstage
Upstage is a privately held South Korean AI company, incorporated and headquartered in South Korea, with a US subsidiary in Silicon Valley and no US parent — meaning it is not subject to the CLOUD Act or FISA Section 702. Its privacy policy is governed primarily by South Korean law with EU/EEA supplemental provisions, and its website implements GDPR-style opt-in cookie consent; however, no EU data-centre presence, DPA, or independently verified GDPR certifications have been confirmed. The company carries one material reputation risk: a January 2026 public controversy in which a competitor alleged its Solar Open 100B model was derived from a Chinese model (Zhipu AI), a claim Upstage publicly refuted and submitted to government verification — the outcome of which is an active government review and should be monitored by EU customers evaluating model provenance integrity.
Stav editorial summary
COMPLIANCE & TRUST
Stav’s creator score.
Stav compliance has not yet scored upstage. Scores are published once the policy review and infrastructure assessment complete.
Findings
Findings from privacy & terms
Citations gathered when the Compliance Curator last reviewed this creator’s public-facing documents. Grouped by source so the picture stays auditable.
huggingface.co · 2 citations
“This repository contains both model weights and code, which are licensed under different terms: MODEL WEIGHTS (*.safetensors) Licensed under Upstage S...”
“Since some non-commercial datasets such as Alpaca are used for fine-tuning, we release fine-tuned model as cc-by-nc-4.0. ”
blog.pebblous.ai · 1 citation
“On May 3, 2026, Korea's National Growth Fund (a 150-trillion-won, five-year sovereign vehicle, roughly $108B) and the Strategic Industries Fund j...”
Reference citations
- Upstage (company) - Wikipedia
(Korean: 주식회사 업스테이지) is a South Korean artificial intelligence company founded in 2020. Upstage was established in 2020 by Sung Kim, a former professo...
- Upstage (company)
[6][7] The company was co-founded by Sung-hoon Kim, who serves as CEO and brings extensive expertise from his prior role as the head of Naver's Clova ...
- Who Owns Upstage AI Company? – CanvasBusinessModel.com
The genesis of Upstage AI began in October 2020 with its co-founding by Eunjeong Lucy Park (CSO), Seong-Hoon Kim (CEO), and Lee Hal-Seok (CTO Stan Lee...
- Korea's AI startup Upstage raises $72 mn for global expansion - KED Global
South Korea's artificial intelligence (AI) startup Upstage announced on Monday that it established the US corporation Upstage AI in Silicon Valle...
- 2025 in Review: South Korea’s Leading AI Innovator Marks Breakout Year After U.S. Launch
Notably, the AI company secured funding from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AMD in August, becoming a minority investor in Upstage.
- upstage/Solar-Open-100B · Hugging Face
This repository contains both model weights and code, which are licensed under different terms: MODEL WEIGHTS (*.safetensors) Licensed under Upstage S...
- upstage/SOLAR-10.7B-v1.0 · Hugging Face
Since some non-commercial datasets such as Alpaca are used for fine-tuning, we release fine-tuned model as cc-by-nc-4.0.
- Upstage AI Unicorn: Korea's First Generative AI Giant - Seoulz