Krafton, Inc.—Krafton froze company-wide hiring and launched a buyout program after declaring itself an 'AI First' company
After CEO Kim Chang-han declared on October 23, 2025 that Krafton would become an 'AI First' company and automate work around agentic AI, CFO Bae Dong-geun announced on a November 4, 2025 earnings call a company-wide hiring freeze excluding original-IP development and AI roles, saying individual productivity -- not cost-cutting -- was the goal. On November 12, 2025, Krafton launched a voluntary resignation program open to all employees, offering severance scaled by tenure from 6 months' salary (under 1 year of service) up to 36 months' salary (11+ years). The moves came shortly after Krafton reported its first-ever quarterly operating profit above 1 trillion won, and alongside announced plans to spend roughly 100 billion won on an Nvidia GPU cluster and 300 billion won annually on employee AI tools.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Responsible Automation | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Worker Rights | -against | secondary | -0.50 |
| Overall incident score = | -0.429 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (medium ×1) × confidence (0.57)
Evidence (1 signal)
Krafton CFO confirms company-wide hiring freeze and voluntary resignation program tied to AI-First push
BusinessKorea and GameSpot reported Krafton CFO Bae Dong-geun's November 4, 2025 earnings-call confirmation of a hiring freeze outside AI and original-IP roles, and the company's November 12, 2025 launch of a tenure-scaled voluntary resignation program, following CEO Kim Chang-han's 'AI First' declaration and a record quarterly operating profit.