Key points
- Espionage now covers foreign countries, not only North Korea
- Whether foreign companies are covered is disputed
- Insiders were 82.7% of tech leak cases
- National core technology sits outside the new article
Korea now has an espionage offence for people who act for a foreign country, not only an enemy state. Until Sunday, that meant the criminal code could reach spying for North Korea but not, on its face, spying for China or another foreign government. The new provision is the first expansion of Korea's espionage offence since the criminal code took effect in 1953.
The question is whether it reaches the chip cases lawmakers keep pointing to. Article 98-2, "espionage for a foreign country or the like," carries a minimum sentence of three years for collecting, leaking, passing on or brokering a state secret on the orders of a foreign country or an equivalent organization. It does not expressly name foreign companies, and it does not cover national core technology as such. Those are the two gaps that decide how much the change does in practice.
Article 98, the older provision for spying for an enemy state, is unchanged and still carries a maximum sentence of death. The National Assembly passed Article 98-2 on February 26, and it was promulgated on March 12 with a six-month delay before it took effect. Korean Law Times (법률신문) reported that the espionage offence had not been widened since October 1953.
The National Intelligence Service said in February that the change would help stop strategic technology leaving Korea, naming semiconductors, displays, batteries and artificial intelligence. One case cited in coverage of the amendment is the prosecution at Samsung Electronics, where five former employees are accused of passing DRAM technology to CXMT, the Chinese memory maker, Edaily (이데일리) reported.
Why it may not reach chip leaks
Most technology leaks in Korea don't look like spying for a government. The National Office of Investigation at the Korean National Police Agency caught 179 technology leak cases in 2025 and arrested 378 people, Kyunghyang Shinmun (경향신문) reported in January. That was a record, up 45.5 percent from 123 cases the year before. Insiders at the victim company accounted for 148 of those cases, or 82.7 percent.
Two more figures from the same count matter here. Small and medium-sized companies were the victims in 155 cases, or 86.6 percent, rather than the large chipmakers the law is usually described as protecting. And only eight of the 179 cases involved national core technology, the legal category Korea uses for its most sensitive industrial know-how.
That category is the first problem. Article 98-2 is written around state secrets, and national core technology isn't one. The separate industrial technology protection law still has to carry that work, Aju Business Daily (아주경제) reported on Sunday.
The second problem is who counts as a foreign actor, and published legal analyses differ on it. A law firm note in Korean Law Times in March read the new wording as reaching acts done for foreign companies and third-country organizations. The Aju Business Daily report said the point is unsettled and could be read one way by investigators and another in court. The question is not academic, because CXMT is a company rather than a government.
The Samsung veteran seeking a broader law
Ko Dong-jin (고동진), a People Power Party lawmaker for the Gangnam B district of Seoul, filed a further amendment to the criminal code on August 31. It would write foreign companies into the text, put national core technology alongside state secrets, and raise the minimum sentence from three years to ten.
Ko spent his career inside the industry the law is meant to protect. He joined Samsung Electronics in 1984 and moved to the wireless business in 2006. He was promoted to president in charge of the phone business in December 2015, then led the IT and mobile division from 2017.
"Even with a friendly country we are not at war with and not in military confrontation with, when the nation's core technology is leaked in the cutting-edge industries that decide the country's future, such as AI and semiconductors, it is urgent to make a legislative policy decision to define it as economic espionage and punish it severely," Ko said in a statement his office put out the day he filed the bill, carried by Today Times (투데이타임즈).
Korean chipmakers are racing Chinese rivals on DRAM capacity. CXMT is the company named in the Samsung prosecution.
China's foreign ministry responded on September 11. China asks its companies to follow international rules, spokesperson Mao Ning said, while calling for a fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese firms, Financial News (파이낸셜뉴스) reported.
The quote from Ko Dong-jin and the Korean news reports cited here are translated from Korean.
