IN Brief:
- South Korea's amended Criminal Act took effect on 13 September and adds offences involving espionage for foreign states or equivalent organisations.
- The change broadens a framework whose principal espionage provision had centred on activity for an enemy state.
- Semiconductor protection is also being reinforced through specialist technology-leak investigators and existing industrial technology legislation.
South Korea has brought an expanded espionage provision into force as the country strengthens legal protection around strategic technology, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence. The amended Criminal Act took effect on 13 September and extends the statutory framework beyond its previous emphasis on espionage conducted for an enemy state.
The revised law adds a provision covering defined espionage activity carried out for a foreign country or an organisation regarded as equivalent to one. The wording encompasses conduct involving national secrets under the direction, instigation, or other communication of a foreign entity, expanding the range of overseas actors potentially covered by the criminal code.
The distinction reflects the origins of South Korea’s existing espionage law, which has been shaped heavily by the country’s security relationship with North Korea. Commercial technology leakage involving other countries has generally been pursued through industrial technology, trade-secret, unfair-competition, and associated legislation rather than the central espionage provision.
The amendment does not automatically turn every case of intellectual-property theft into espionage. Prosecutors still have to establish the statutory elements of the offence, while separate legislation continues to govern designated industrial and strategic technologies. Semiconductor process data, equipment drawings, source code, manufacturing recipes, and other proprietary information may therefore fall under different legal routes depending on what was taken, how it was obtained, and who directed the activity.
Electronics technology has acquired greater national-security weight as semiconductors have become central to artificial intelligence infrastructure, defence systems, communications, vehicles, and advanced manufacturing. South Korea’s position in memory production makes that particularly acute: Samsung Electronics and SK hynix sit at the centre of global DRAM, NAND flash, and HBM supply, supported by a large ecosystem of equipment, materials, components, and specialist engineering companies.
Process knowledge moves through that ecosystem rather than remaining entirely inside the largest chipmakers. Equipment suppliers may hold detailed information about production configurations, while materials companies, packaging houses, software suppliers, subcontractors, researchers, and former employees can each have access to commercially sensitive parts of the manufacturing chain.
Korean authorities have consequently been expanding specialist enforcement alongside the legislative change. The country’s intellectual-property authorities reorganised technology-leak investigation this year, creating a dedicated advanced-technology leakage function and increasing the specialist technology-police workforce from 27 to 61 officers. Semiconductor and AI technology are explicitly within that remit.
The National Intelligence Service has also documented investigations involving attempted overseas transfer of semiconductor technology and manufacturing information. Cases have involved employees or supplier personnel with access to drawings, process knowledge, or other protected material, illustrating how leakage risk extends beyond straightforward theft from a central corporate database.
Employee mobility creates one of the more difficult boundaries. Experienced semiconductor engineers are internationally employable, and general professional knowledge cannot sensibly be treated in the same way as proprietary documents or protected process information. Companies therefore have to separate legitimate movement of expertise from the copying, removal, disclosure, or use of controlled technical material.
Security procedures increasingly follow the information through the supply chain. Access permissions, removable media controls, supplier agreements, network segmentation, document classification, monitoring, and offboarding procedures all become part of technology protection where several organisations contribute to the same manufacturing programme.
South Korea already operates specific frameworks around National Core Technologies and other designated strategic technologies, including rules governing unauthorised disclosure and overseas transfer. The expanded espionage provision adds another potential criminal route where the conduct involves national secrets and a foreign-state connection rather than replacing those existing mechanisms.
The semiconductor industry is therefore dealing with overlapping forms of protection: conventional trade-secret controls, industrial-technology legislation, export restrictions, corporate cybersecurity, physical access control, and now a broader national espionage provision. Which mechanism applies will depend on the material involved and the circumstances of an individual case.
The policy direction is nevertheless becoming harder to separate from semiconductor strategy. Governments that once treated process recipes, memory architectures, equipment technology, and manufacturing expertise principally as corporate intellectual property increasingly view some of the same information through an economic-security lens.
South Korea’s amendment formalises part of that shift without removing the legal distinctions between commercial IP theft and espionage. Semiconductor companies and their suppliers still need conventional information-security controls, but the consequences surrounding certain transfers are increasingly determined by national-security law as well as by the commercial value of the technology itself.
