Anthropic has formally opened its Seoul office, marking its third location in Asia-Pacific after Tokyo and Bengaluru and signaling a deeper commitment to one of the world's most active AI markets. The office is led by KiYoung Choi, former General Manager of Snowflake Korea, who joins as Representative Director.
Alongside the opening, Anthropic announced a broad set of partnerships spanning enterprise, research, and the public sector. On the enterprise side, NAVER is rolling out Claude Code across its full engineering organization, Samsung SDS is deploying Claude Cowork and Claude Code across Samsung Electronics, and LG CNS is bringing Claude to the wider LG Group. Game studio Nexon will use Claude Code for live-service game development, Hanwha Solutions will access Claude via AWS Bedrock with in-region data controls, and Channel Corp will use Claude to power its Channel Talk platform serving more than 230,000 businesses.
On the research front, Anthropic will provide Claude to up to sixty researchers affiliated with Korea's National AI Research Lab consortium, which includes KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei, and POSTECH. The company also signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT to collaborate on public-sector AI adoption, model safety testing, and efforts to address AI-related cybersecurity threats.
The expansion comes at a complicated moment, as recent US export controls have restricted Korean access to some of Anthropic's most advanced models. Industry observers note the Seoul push also arrives as the company weighs a future public offering, underscoring the strategic value it places on the Korean market and its concentration of large technology conglomerates.
Anthropic framed the move as part of a longer-term strategy to support safe AI deployment in the region while building local enterprise demand for its Claude family of models.
Source: [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/seoul-office-partnerships-korean-ai-ecosystem)