Over the past 20 years, sales volumes in the knowledge-intensive sectors of the developed world grew about 2 times faster than in the manufacturing industry. It is no coincidence that the share of knowledge-intensive sectors of the manufacturing industry and the service sector today accounts for an average of more than half the GDP of the leading industrial countries. A new, knowledge-based economy creates new resources that effectively replace natural resources and human intellect. A high-end economy is the creation of new, artificial energy and artificial intelligence and their use in all sectors of the economy. In addition, a knowledge-intensive economy is a large-scale use of scientific developments, a new content of labor and the attitude of all its participants to it. A high-tech economy is born and is able to develop in a social environment with a sufficient level of intellectual development of society. The creation of such an economy requires not only a high level of development and implementation of new resource-creating and resource-saving technologies, but also a mass knowledge of new technologies, skills to use in production and everyday life. A high-tech economy is formed in conditions of sufficient intellectual security. With all this, the urgency of finding answers to the questions is growing: what conditions are necessary for the creation and functioning of a knowledge-based economy. In this regard, firstly, the article compares the level of development of human resources in the Republic of Kazakhstan with other countries of the world, which allows us to conclude that in terms of quantitative indicators (coverage of primary, secondary, vocational and higher education, life expectancy), our country has average positions in the world ranking. Secondly, in order to identify the relationship between a number of indicators of the method of assessing intellectual security in Kazakhstan, a correlation analysis for 2004-2017 was conducted. This article expands the knowledge on methods of assessing intellectual security for the development of a knowledge-based economy in developing countries.