Kakao Kanana
Kakao's AI brand: an assistant in KakaoTalk and open-weight Korean models
Overview
Kanana is Kakao's AI brand: Kanana in KakaoTalk, an on-device assistant inside the messenger, and the Kanana family of language models published on Hugging Face, including the 30B mixture-of-experts Kanana-2. The standalone Kanana app, in beta from May 2025, closed on 15 October 2026.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 18 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
What you can produce with Kakao Kanana
- Summaries and analysis of selected KakaoTalk chat rooms from Kanana in KakaoTalk
- KakaoTalk settings, Kakao Pay transfers and Talk Calendar entries handled by chat instruction
- Kanana-2 30B mixture-of-experts weights, in instruct and reasoning versions, for self-hosting
- Compact Kanana-2 3B and 1.3B models for on-device deployment with 32K context
- Text generation in Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese
- Kanana Safeguard models for screening prompts and outputs
ASEAN Perspective
Kakao Kanana in Southeast Asia
Kanana-2 (December 2025) explicitly added Thai and Vietnamese to its six supported languages, making it one of the few Korean-origin LLMs with deliberate ASEAN language coverage, though English and Korean remain the primary training focus. The on-device architecture is directly relevant to ASEAN markets where data-sovereignty concerns and patchy connectivity make server-side inference less desirable; the 600 MB Nano model is deployable on mid-range Android devices common across Southeast Asia. Kakao's strategic partnership with Google for on-device AI (announced February 2026) may accelerate Android-native deployment in ASEAN, but Kakao has no meaningful consumer distribution in the region today. Data generated by Kanana is processed on-device for the lightweight model, reducing cross-border data transfer exposure under ASEAN member-state personal data laws such as Thailand's PDPA and Singapore's PDPA, though this advantage only applies when the on-device path is used — cloud fallbacks to OpenAI's infrastructure reintroduce offshore data flows.
For most readers outside Korea, Kanana means the models. Kanana-2 is a capable 30B mixture-of-experts release with Thai and Vietnamese among its six languages, and its licence allows commercial use inside your own services; reselling access or passing 10 million monthly users needs a separate Kakao licence. Check the licence of each release, because Kanana Nano is non-commercial and Kanana 1.5 8B is Apache 2.0.
The consumer assistant now lives only inside KakaoTalk, after the standalone app's closure on 15 October 2026, and it is built for Korean users.
What we found
Kanana is the AI brand of Kakao Corp., the company behind KakaoTalk, which unveiled it in October 2024. It now covers two quite different things: an assistant built into KakaoTalk, and a family of language models whose weights Kakao publishes on Hugging Face. Kakao's Kanana hub at kanana.ai links to both.
The consumer side has been reshaped this year. Kanana began as a standalone chat app, in beta from May 2025, with AI companions, voice chat and an image studio. Kakao announced on 15 September 2026 that the app and its PC version would close on 15 October 2026, with backups allowed until the day before, and that the work would move into KakaoTalk. It did: on 19 October 2026 kanana.ai listed only Kanana in KakaoTalk and the open models, and Kakao's app no longer appeared in the Korean App Store. There, Kanana in KakaoTalk launched officially in March 2026 and runs on an on-device model. A June update, reported by the Herald, added summaries and analysis of chosen chat rooms, settings changes by instruction, Kakao Pay transfers and Talk Calendar entries. It is a Korean-market service, built into the messenger rather than sold separately.
The models are what matter outside Korea. Kanana-2, released from December 2025, is a mixture-of-experts model with 30 billion parameters, 3 billion active, a 32,000-token context and support for Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese, in instruct and reasoning versions; smaller 3B and 1.3B models followed in July 2026 for on-device use. Licences differ by release. Kanana Nano is non-commercial, Kanana 1.5 8B is Apache 2.0, and Kanana-2 uses Kakao's own licence, which permits commercial use in your own services but requires a separate deal to resell access through an API, system integration or devices, or once you pass 10 million monthly users, and asks for a Powered by Kanana credit.
Kakao itself is changing shape: in August its board approved a split, with a new KakaoAI company taking KakaoTalk and AI from 1 January 2027, pending a December shareholder vote.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- Kanana Nano runs entirely on-device in under 600 MB — the same phone storage as about 150 photos — with no chat data sent to external servers.
- The name 'Kanana' fuses 'Kakao', 'native', and 'natural', signalling that the AI is meant to feel indigenous to Korea's chat culture rather than an imported overlay.
- ChatGPT integration inside KakaoTalk (powered alongside Kanana) signed up 2 million Korean users in just ten days after its October 2025 launch.
- Kanana-2's open-weight model supports regional Korean dialects including Jeju and Gyeongsang variants — a rare capability even among Korean-language models.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Kakao Kanana's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Kakao Kanana unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to Kakao Kanana directly →
Spotted something out of date? Suggest an update →
More in LLMs & Chat
