Advances in compact proofs have erased Poseidon’s previous performance advantage, according to researcher Justin Drake.
Palo Alto, United States, June 26th, 2026, Chainwire
Toss users can now contribute real-world data to train AI and get paid for it, in a first-of-its-kind model launching in Korea ahead of global expansion.
Poseidon, the data infrastructure built to source and license real-world data for AI, today announced a partnership with Toss, the mobile financial platform operated by Viva Republica, to let everyday users contribute to AI training and be paid for what they provide. It is Toss’s first move into AI data, and it opens that market to its roughly 30 million users.
Frontier AI has run out of internet to scrape. The next generation of models depends on real-world data, the kind that captures how people actually speak, move, and react, which does not exist on the open web and has never had a clean way to be sourced, licensed, or paid for. Poseidon is building the infrastructure to change that, and Toss brings the reach to do it at scale.
Through the partnership, Poseidon’s contributor app, Numo, launches inside the Toss app. Toss users can help build Korean-language training data across voice, image, and video, and receive payment tied directly to what they contribute. Poseidon provides the infrastructure that tracks each contribution and its value, while Toss provides the user base and the financial experience that turns participation into payment. Together they offer a working answer to a question the AI industry has struggled with, which is how to compensate the people whose data makes models better.
Every contribution made through Numo is registered on DATA, the AI data network that Poseidon refines data for. DATA gives each record a verifiable provenance trail through Trace, its public audit layer, so a buyer can see where a piece of training data came from and a contributor can see that their work was counted and paid. DATA Foundation, which launched this week from the rebrand of Story, is building this layer alongside integration partners including the human data marketplace Kled, and Poseidon is one of the largest sources of refined data flowing into it.
What Numo collects is first-person data, recorded by real people in real environments, which is among the hardest and most valuable categories to obtain. It is the raw material for physical intelligence, the AI that has to operate in the physical world across robotics, autonomous vehicles, and other applications. Demand from global AI labs for this kind of data is climbing, and Korea is positioned to supply it, with its dense real-life data and Toss’s user base. Poseidon and Toss intend to prove the model in Korea, then expand to global markets.
Changhoon Seo, Executive Director of New Business at Toss, said: “As the AI industry grows, demand for high-quality data is rising just as fast. Toss plans to build an environment where users can take part in the data economy more easily and naturally, and to expand a structure in which the value they contribute is rewarded transparently.”
SY Lee, Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of Poseidon, said: “Korea is one of the few markets where the strategic importance of AI data, a mature financial system, and world-class mobile experience all exist at once. Toss is the right partner to turn user-contributed AI data from an early idea into a standard the rest of the world can adopt.” Lee previously founded the web-novel platform Radish and sold it to Kakao Entertainment, co-founded Story, the IP infrastructure that recently rebranded as DATA Foundation, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum this year.
About Poseidon
Poseidon is the data infrastructure for AI, built to source, refine, and license the real-world data that frontier models need and the open internet cannot supply. Incubated by the team behind The DATA Network, Poseidon bridges the gap between data supply and AI demand by enabling access to high-quality, IP-safe, and composable training datasets. Poseidon raised a $15 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Poseidon’s contributor app, Numo, has recorded more than 711,000 data registrations worldwide and is available and is now available on the Toss app.
HV
henri.vies@piplabs.xyz
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday his country has tested “Poseidon,” a nuclear-powered underwater drone designed to detonate off enemy coastlines and kick up radioactive tsunamis.
Putin described the trial as the first to use Poseidon’s nuclear propulsion after a submarine launch, calling it more powerful than the Sarmat ICBM.
It’s a claim that revives one of Moscow’s most alarming “superweapon” concepts and raises fresh questions about the line between deterrence posturing and nuclear brinkmanship.
Russia has been advertising Poseidon since 2018 as a way to bypass U.S. missile defenses; independent verification of this week’s test remains thin, but reputable monitors note the program’s continued development and sea trials.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, lists Poseidon in its 2024 yearbook as an active Russian weapons program designed for deployment from special-purpose submarines.
However, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty notes Moscow’s test claims often precede independent verification.
Strategists at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists argue Poseidon is as much a psychological weapon as a military one, meant to sow fear even if its ultimate battlefield value is debatable.
What the weapon is supposed to do is straightforward, if chilling: carry a very large nuclear warhead across oceans at depth and speed, detonate near a coast, and drive a surge of contaminated water ashore.
Russian media and surrogates have hyped tsunami heights that many Western analysts consider exaggerated; still, even conservative estimates of a multi-megaton undersea blast near a port would be catastrophic for any coastal city.
How real is the threat?
Putin routinely pairs weapons reveals with grievances about the ABM Treaty’s demise and NATO expansion, casting exotic systems like Poseidon as counters to U.S. missile defense.
Last week, he staged a triad “readiness” drill; earlier, he touted the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile. None of that changes the central balance—Russia already has ample means to devastate U.S. and European cities with conventional strategic forces—but it does complicate arms-control diplomacy and crisis signaling.
Skepticism is warranted on two fronts. First, independent evidence of a successful, end-to-end Poseidon trial hasn’t surfaced. Russian statements have, in the past, outpaced verifiable technical detail.
Second, the “radioactive tsunami” branding obscures physics that are nasty enough without hyperbole.
An undersea nuclear detonation near shore would cause extreme local destruction and contamination, but some of the apocalyptic wave claims come from Russian television, not peer-reviewed hydrodynamics.
If Moscow is now running nuclear-propelled sea trials, Poseidon has moved from slide deck to water.
But even fully realized, it’s less a war-winning superweapon than a grisly new way to deliver an old threat—one calibrated to spook audiences and unsettle negotiators as much as to rewrite deterrence math.
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