Anthropic opens Seoul office and puts Claude into Korea's largest tech groups
Anthropic opened its Seoul office and named a set of Korean deployments across NAVER, Nexon, LG CNS, Hanwha Solutions, Samsung SDS, Channel Corp, Good Neighbors Korea, and the National AI Research Lab. The brief explains why this is more than a location announcement: it is Anthropic's latest enterprise distribution push while Fable 5 and Mythos 5 remain caught in a U.S. export-control dispute.
Anthropic's Seoul office is now open, and the company used the launch to name a cluster of Korean enterprise, research, and startup deployments: NAVER, Nexon, LG CNS, Hanwha Solutions, Samsung SDS, Channel Corp, the National AI Research Lab, and Good Neighbors Korea. 1
What happened
The office is led by KiYoung Choi, Anthropic's representative director for Korea. Anthropic said senior leaders were in Seoul this week to open the office and meet partners, customers, and developers building with Claude. 1
The customer list is the substance of the announcement. NAVER has deployed Claude Code across its entire engineering organization, with thousands of engineers using it. Nexon is using Claude Code for live-service game development. LG CNS is rolling Claude out to thousands of employees and plans to extend it across LG Group. Samsung SDS is deploying Claude, including Claude Cowork and Claude Code, to Samsung Electronics employees. 1
Anthropic also named Hanwha Solutions, Channel Corp, Good Neighbors Korea, and a research partnership with the National AI Research Lab consortium, which spans KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH. Anthropic said it will provide Claude access to up to 60 NAIRL-affiliated researchers working on safety, model evaluation, alignment, robustness, and frontier AI research. 1
Why it matters
This is a partnership event, not just a new address. Anthropic already announced TCS and DXC as global enterprise channels last week; the Seoul launch shows a different route: direct adoption by Korean conglomerates, software teams, game developers, startups, and research labs in one market.
The Korea Times reported that Choi said the office reflects Anthropic's plan to build a long-term local foundation, while International Managing Director Chris Ciauri said Korea already has momentum across enterprise, developer, and startup sectors. The same report said Ciauri put Anthropic's run-rate revenue at $47 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. 2
The timing is awkward for Anthropic. Korean institutions are also caught up in the U.S. export-control dispute over Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Korea JoongAng Daily reported that Ciauri said Anthropic is "very confident" the models will become available again "in the coming days," although executives declined to answer most questions about the shutdown at the Seoul press event. 3
For customers, the read-through is simple: Anthropic is still selling Claude hard into strategic overseas markets even while its most advanced models remain entangled in Washington's security review.
References
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