How one CEO’s chatbot could cost his company $355 million

March 20, 2026 — 5:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Save this article for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.

Australia’s most expensive barristers can charge tens of thousands of dollars a day. The solicitors who brief them earn less, but swarm cases in far greater numbers. America’s legal system makes that all look cheap: their litigators can charge $US3400 an hour ($4800).

ChatGPT, by contrast, is free. The pro version is a princely $300 a month.

That may be why Kim Chang-han, chief executive of a giant South Korean video game developer called Krafton, may have opted to take the AI chatbot’s advice rather than turning to a human lawyer.

If so, it may be one of the largest false economies in history, and one that says a lot about how AI is being used, or misused, in 2026.

Kim, whose company made the massively popular game PUBG: Battlegrounds, had agreed to buy a smaller developer called Unknown Worlds in 2021. Its signature series was Subnautica, an underwater adventure game set on an alien world that its founders had created as an antidote to the saturation of guns in video games after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. The first edition of that title was acclaimed, and very popular, when it came out in 2018.

“It is fantastical, fresh and frightening from surface to seabed, with a story that kept on surprising me and a cast of sea monsters that quite literally haunted my dreams,”........

© The Sydney Morning Herald