Kanana

Kanana is Kakao's proprietary language-model lineup, released openly on Hugging Face since 2024 as part of Korea's sovereign-AI wave. The latest generation, Kanana-2 (released December 19, 2025), is a 30B-parameter MoE model with just 3B active parameters, using multi-head latent attention and a 128-expert mixture to deliver high throughput for agentic AI workloads. It ships in Base, Instruct, and first-ever Thinking (reasoning) variants, with all training-stage weights disclosed for fine-tuning.

Kanana-2 more than tripled multi-turn tool-calling performance over Kanana-1.5-32.5B and expanded from Korean/English to six languages (adding Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese) with a new tokenizer that's over 30% more efficient on Korean. Kakao also open-sourced on-device SLMs (Kanana-2-1.3B and 0.9B) for smartphones. Notably, no Kakao user data was used in training — a deliberate privacy posture.