South Korea's Privacy Regulator Helps Unwind the National AI Digital Textbook Rollout

South Korea's Ministry of Education launched its national AI Digital Textbook (AIDT) project for the March 2025 school year, covering English and maths for elementary grades 3-4 plus English, maths and computer science for middle and high school. The government compressed the usual development and review cycle (12 months of development and 3 months of review, versus 18 and 9 months respectively for ordinary textbooks) and committed at least 533.3 billion won in that fiscal year alone, part of roughly 1.2 trillion won ($850m) in public spending against about 800 billion won ($567m) invested by publishers.

In May 2025, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), Korea's independent data-protection regulator, completed a preliminary inspection of the AIDT project and found two instances of legal violation plus several further gaps in how the programme's personal-information-protection mechanisms were designed, recommending that the education ministry and the state agency running the project correct or reinforce those safeguards. The finding was one of several problems cited in the project's collapse: reviewers and parents also flagged factual inaccuracies, heavier workload for teachers and students, technical failures that delayed classes, and excessive screen time.

Adoption fell from about 37% of eligible classes in the first semester to 19% in the second, and the number of schools using the textbooks dropped from roughly 4,190 to 2,095. On 4 August 2025, South Korea's National Assembly passed legislation redefining official textbooks to cover only printed and e-books, stripping AI digital textbooks of their official status and reducing them to optional supplementary material -- a reversal that publishers say jeopardises jobs created to build the programme. It is a rare, well-documented case of an independent privacy regulator's findings converging with quality and workload complaints to help unwind a large, government-mandated EdTech rollout.

Read the full analysis: https://www.mlex.com/mlex/artificial-intelligence/articles/2340436/south-korea-ai-textbook-project-needs-better-privacy-protection-regulator-says