SOUTH KOREA PERSPECTIVE

Seoul takes the analytical counterpoint: while San Francisco debates pause, Tokyo debates deals and Paris debates regulation, Korea Herald produces a field report from San Francisco at Upscale Conf — the AI creative conference gathering hundreds of tech companies, filmmakers, designers and AI startups on June 5. The angle: the next battle is not about output quality (images, videos, code) but about controlling workflows. Joaquin Cuenca, Magnific's CEO, announces his company is rolling out a suite — Agents, Flows and Magnific Model Context Protocol — to help creative teams "build, manage and scale AI-powered workflows across organizations." His punchline: "Access isn't the same as building. Building means your team can run it, not just you. It means the AI remembers your work, not just your last message." The report deploys an underlying critique: current AIs give answers, not processes. Yet creators don't just want the result — they want to understand the process so they can intervene at any point. For Seoul, this complicates the reading of Anthropic's pause request: the real ethical question is not the "capability" of models but the transparency of production chains. A general pause without rethinking workflows would solve nothing. While the White House focuses on models, Seoul redirects to processes.