The national artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model project, promoted as a major step towards the country’s AI sovereignty, has hit unexpected turbulence with allegations that its leading contenders borrowed key components from Chinese models, triggering debate over defining "development from scratch." Two of five consortia, led by Naver Cloud and Upstage, have been embroiled in controversy over meeting the project’s essential from-scratch requirement. Naver Cloud came under fire when claims surfaced in developer communities earlier this week that its flagship model for the project, HyperCLOVA X SEED 32B Think, shows striking similarities to Alibaba’s open-sourced Qwen 2.4 large language model (LLM) in its vision encoder. A vision encoder is a component that processes images and video into data that AI can understand. The cosine similarity and Pearson correlation, the two widely used comparison methods, between the two models’ vision encoder values exceeded 99.5 percent and 98.9 percent, suggesting near-identical patterns. Naver Cloud acknowledged that it used outside open