A senior South Korean policy official has sparked intense debate and a dramatic stock market swing by floating the idea of paying citizens a share of the economic windfall generated by artificial intelligence, spotlighting mounting pressure to more broadly distribute the enormous wealth flowing to chipmakers like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
The proposal, floated in a Facebook post by Kim Yong-beom, the presidential policy chief, sent the country's benchmark Kospi index on a vertiginous journey Tuesday. The index tumbled as much as 5.1% as investors scrambled to understand what the suggestion might mean in practice, before recovering much of that ground after Kim clarified he was thinking about redistributing surplus government tax receipts from AI-driven growth — not imposing a new direct levy on corporate windfall profits. Samsung and SK Hynix shares clawed back most of their initial declines.
