Anthropic opens Seoul office and announces Korean AI ecosystem partnerships

What happened

On June 17, 2026, Anthropic formally opened its Seoul office — the third in APAC after Tokyo and Bengaluru. KiYoung Choi, former General Manager of Snowflake Korea, leads it as Representative Director. The company simultaneously announced a bundle of enterprise, research and non-profit partnerships across Korea.

Context and impact

The expansion comes only days after the Trump administration imposed export controls on Anthropic's most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The move signals that Anthropic's Asia bet is independent of those restrictions and proceeds via older Claude variants.

Details

• NAVER: Claude Code across the full engineering organization
• Samsung SDS: Claude Cowork and Claude Code for Samsung Electronics
• LG CNS: Claude across the LG Group
• Nexon: Claude Code for live-service game development
• Hanwha Solutions: Claude via AWS Bedrock with in-region data controls
• Channel Corp: Claude powering Channel Talk for 230,000+ businesses
• Research: Claude for ~60 researchers across KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei, POSTECH
• Government: MoU with the Ministry of Science and ICT on AI safety