Anthropic opens Seoul office to expand Korea ties

Anthropic formally opened its Seoul office on June 17, 2026, its third in Asia-Pacific after Tokyo and Bengaluru. KiYoung Choi, appointed Representative Director of Anthropic Korea in May 2026, leads the office. Choi brings three decades of experience across Korean and Asia-Pacific technology businesses, including prior roles as General Manager of Snowflake Korea and country head positions at Google Cloud, Adobe, and Autodesk, and COO at Microsoft Korea. "What I see in Korea are teams who understand that innovation and safety are two sides of the same coin," Choi said in Anthropic's official announcement. "Korean organizations are building with Claude to bring the benefits of AI to millions around the world."

Alongside the opening, Anthropic disclosed a wave of new enterprise deployments across Korea's major technology companies and conglomerates. NAVER, Korea's largest internet company, deployed Claude Code across its entire engineering organization, with thousands of engineers using it to diversify coding tools and boost productivity. Samsung SDS, the IT services arm of Samsung Group, is deploying Claude - including Claude Cowork and Claude Code - to employees across Samsung Electronics for knowledge work, agentic workflows, and software development. LG CNS, the IT services arm of LG Group, is rolling out Claude to thousands of employees and plans to extend the deployment across LG Group. Hanwha Solutions (energy, chemicals, and advanced materials) is deploying Claude via AWS Bedrock, meeting strict in-region data-residency and security requirements. Nexon, a global online game company, uses Claude Code for engineering on live-service games played by millions. Channel Corp uses Claude to power Channel Talk, a customer AI platform used by more than 230,000 companies across Korea, Japan, and the United States. Existing customers WRTN and Law&Company - whose AI legal assistant reportedly doubled lawyer efficiency rates - were also referenced as long-standing deployments.

Anthropic will provide Claude access to up to sixty researchers affiliated with the National AI Research Lab (NAIRL), a consortium of KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH, supporting work on AI safety, model evaluation, alignment, robustness, and broader frontier AI research. Good Neighbors Korea, a child rights NGO, is deploying Claude to help staff analyze program outcomes, navigate social welfare law, and reduce administrative workload. "Good Neighbors Korea is exploring how responsible AI transformation can support frontline social workers, protect vulnerable populations, and strengthen service delivery," said Jeongsun Park, Chief Administrative Officer of Good Neighbors Korea.

According to Anthropic's latest Economic Index, Korea is among the top dozen countries globally for Claude.ai use, concentrated in technical and creative work. Claude for Startups is live in Korea, and Claude Meetups have drawn hundreds of Korean developers since September 2025. This week Anthropic co-hosted Claude Build Day with BASS Ventures for more than 100 Korean founders and developers, and will co-host a Push to Prod hackathon with Replit, Korea Investment Partners, and Korea Investment Accelerator.

Anthropic's October 2025 announcement cited APAC run-rate revenue growing more than 10x in the prior year, with Claude Code weekly active users in Korea growing 6x in four months, and large-business APAC accounts (above $100,000 in run-rate revenue) growing 8x. The concentration of new deployments among major Korean conglomerates (Samsung, LG, Hanwha) signals that Claude is being adopted at the IT-services and enterprise level, not only in specialist AI teams.

A staffed local office from a major model provider typically accelerates enterprise procurement and integration cycles, data-residency and compliance support (the Hanwha/Bedrock example illustrates this directly), regional developer partnership programs, and access to vendor engineering and product teams. For teams in Korea or nearby markets, the breadth of announced deployments - spanning consumer tech, enterprise IT services, gaming, and non-profit - points to rising demand for Claude integrations, connectors, and API work across multiple industry verticals.