WASHINGTON, April 22 — North Korean animators may have helped create popular television cartoons for big Western firms, including Amazon and HBO Max, despite international sanctions on North Korea, a research report has found.
“There’s no way that anyone could have known it, except for the operational security error which exposed it,” he said.Skybound said it had no knowledge of any North Korean companies working on its animation, but took the allegations seriously and had initiated a thorough internal review to verify and rectify any potential issues.
“Often the files contained editing comments and instructions in Chinese, presumably written by the production company, along with a translation of those instructions into Korean,” it said. The report noted that in 2021 and 2022 the US government also imposed sanctions on Chinese companies that have worked with the studio or acted as a go-between.Invincible
Two of the latter were registered to China’s Liaoning Province, which neighbours North Korea and where there are many North Korean-operated businesses and North Korean IT workers.