North Korea says AI now guides its new super-speed torpedo after an underwater test

North Korea said on Saturday 17 October 2026 that it had carried out an underwater test-firing of a new super-speed precision-guided torpedo weapon system, called the Zam-2.0, two days earlier on Thursday 15 October. The state Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the firing was meant to confirm the results of a technical upgrade to the weapon and described the test as a success.

According to KCNA, the test was run by the Academy of Defence Science, the Missile General Bureau and a torpedo weapons research bureau, and was presented as part of the normal work of defence research institutes to raise the technical level of weapon systems. Senior defence science officials who watched the firing judged it a major achievement that foreshadowed a significant change in the practical development of the navy, the agency said.

The agency said artificial intelligence had been applied to the torpedo's target detection and guidance functions. It added that the test proved core technology for raising propulsion efficiency and the performance of the weapon's rocket propulsion devices, which it said had been developed through more than 180 tests over the past five years.

KCNA did not publish any specifications for the Zam-2.0, such as its speed, range or warhead, and did not say what ship or submarine launched it or where the test was held. Yonhap noted that the report ran only on KCNA, the regime's outward-facing outlet, and was not carried by Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party newspaper that ordinary North Koreans read.

The torpedo test capped a busy week at sea for Pyongyang. On Wednesday 14 October North Korea fired two types of strategic cruise missiles in the East Sea from what is presumed to be the 3,000-tonne submarine Hero Kim Kun Ok, using both its vertical launch tubes and its torpedo tubes, according to Yonhap. Japan's defence ministry had reported two ballistic missiles fired from the Pyongyang area towards the Sea of Japan earlier in the week, USNI News said.

The new weapons are arriving alongside new hulls. North Korea has recently commissioned two 5,000-tonne destroyers, the Choe Hyon and the Kang Kon, assigning them to its West Sea and East Sea fleets respectively, and has been pushing to strengthen its naval capabilities through a run of weapon tests.

None of the claims about the Zam-2.0 can be checked from the outside, and KCNA offered no data to back them up. Taken at face value, though, a rocket-boosted torpedo with smarter homing is aimed squarely at the surface ships and submarines that South Korea, the United States and Japan rely on around the peninsula, and the timing puts it in front of allied navies just as the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group arrives in Japan for the Keen Sword drill that opens on Monday.

For Taiwan and its partners, the week's tests are a reminder that the same allied anti-submarine forces expected to watch Chinese submarines in the waters around Japan and Taiwan must also keep track of a North Korean fleet that is adding submarines, destroyers and now, it says, faster and smarter torpedoes.