Anthropic Opens Seoul Office as Korea's AI Push Moves Beyond the Chip
By Jeremy ·
Anthropic has opened an office in Seoul. The office is led by KiYoung Choi, who spent three decades running technology businesses across Korea before taking the role. It's hiring across multiple positions. Alongside the opening, the company announced a series of enterprise, government, and research partnerships that make clear this isn't a minimal presence.
Who's Actually Using Claude
The list of Korean organizations now deploying Claude is longer than you'd expect.
NAVER - Korea's dominant search and cloud company - has rolled out Claude Code to its entire engineering organization. Thousands of engineers are using it as part of their daily workflow. At Nexon, the online game company, engineering teams use Claude Code to write, review, and ship code for live-service games played by millions globally.
On the enterprise side: Samsung SDS, the IT services arm of Samsung Group, is deploying Claude to employees across Samsung Electronics, using both Claude Code and Claude Cowork for software development and knowledge work. LG CNS is rolling Claude out to thousands of employees and plans to extend the deployment across LG Group. Hanwha Solutions is bringing Claude to global employees through AWS Bedrock, with in-region data residency in place. Channel Corp uses Claude to power Channel Talk, its customer platform used by over 230,000 companies across Korea, Japan, and the United States.
That's not a pilot. That's production at scale across some of Korea's largest conglomerates.
The Government and Research Layer
Anthropic also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT. The agreement covers collaboration on AI safety and cybersecurity, including evaluating model safety in the Korean language with the Korea AI Safety Institute and sharing information on AI-enabled cyber threats.
On the research side, Anthropic will provide Claude access to up to 60 researchers affiliated with the National AI Research Lab (NAIRL), a consortium that includes KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH. The focus is AI safety, model evaluation, alignment, and robustness.
Good Neighbors Korea, a child rights NGO, is also deploying Claude. Staff will use it to analyze program outcomes, reference social welfare law and internal guidelines, and reduce the administrative load that keeps them from fieldwork.
Korea's Chip Economy and What This Move Signals
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together account for roughly 52% to 60% of South Korea's major equity benchmarks. Two companies representing more than half of a country's entire stock market index is unusual anywhere. It means the performance of Korean equities, in aggregate, tracks semiconductor demand more closely than almost any other single variable.
The AI boom has been the dominant driver of that demand. HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) - the architecture required to feed data to AI accelerators at the speeds modern models need - is overwhelmingly produced by SK Hynix and Samsung. Every large AI model being trained or deployed at scale is almost certainly running on Korean-made memory.
Korea has been supplying the hardware layer of the AI stack for years. The companies buying those chips to build AI are now selling AI software back to Korean enterprises at scale. Anthropic's Seoul office is one marker of that shift.
The chipmaking business is real but cyclical - margins compress, demand oscillates, and the companies have limited pricing power over what their customers decide to buy next cycle. The software layer tends to be stickier. Whether Korean organizations will capture more value from AI applications than from AI hardware is an open question, but the appetite is clearly there.
Developer Activity
Korea ranks in the top 12 countries globally for Claude.ai usage, per Anthropic's own economic index, with a concentration in technical and creative work. The developer community has been active for a while: Claude Meetups have drawn hundreds of Korean developers since September 2025, and Claude for Startups is now live in Korea.
This week, Anthropic co-hosted Claude Build Day with BASS Ventures, bringing more than 100 Korean founders and developers together with Anthropic's engineering and product teams. A hackathon is also planned with Replit, Korea Investment Partners, and Korea Investment Accelerator, with mentorship from engineers on both sides.
The Seoul office is open and hiring across multiple roles. The enterprise partnerships announced alongside it - across gaming, cloud, IT services, energy, and customer support - suggest a market that was already well-prepared before Anthropic showed up.