Sam Altman Visits Samsung to Discuss AI Adoption

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will travel to Samsung Electronics' office in Suwon, south of Seoul, on Monday of next week, where he will deliver a lecture on the transformative impact of AI technologies and strategies for AI-driven workplace innovation, according to industry sources cited by The Korea Herald and Yonhap. The trip is Altman's first to South Korea in about eight months.

The visit lands two days after Samsung formally announced its companywide AI transformation. On June 9, Samsung said it would roll out Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude across all of its affiliates this month -- the first time the conglomerate has adopted outside AI models groupwide. The initiative, which Samsung calls the starting point of an 'AI transformation' (AX), aims to embed AI across the entire value chain, from research and manufacturing to marketing and support. Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong initiated the effort in his January New Year's message, calling for the company to fundamentally change its work processes and organizational culture and to become an 'AI-native company' -- framing the shift as the next major pivot after digital and mobile transformations.

The reversal is notable. Samsung banned public generative AI on its devices in 2023 after engineers leaked proprietary source code, an equipment-defect sequence, and a confidential meeting transcript into ChatGPT. The new rollout is engineered around that history. Samsung Electronics' DX division ran a two-month proof-of-concept from April to May with 2,500 employees testing ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and built a control system that grants tool access only to staff who complete internal security training, with a prompt-inspection layer that blocks sensitive material before it reaches an external model. External tools are deployed as enterprise versions, whose vendors commit not to train on customer data by default. Samsung Gauss, its in-house model, runs alongside external tools in a two-track approach that keeps sensitive work internal.

Samsung is sequencing the rollout from the top. About 50 affiliate presidents will attend an intensive 'AX Boot Camp' this month, presenting their own proposals for redesigning workflows with AI. Roughly 2,300 executives are then scheduled for training through August 12, with a companywide rollout planned for the rest of the year.

Altman's previous South Korea visit in October 2025 included separate meetings with Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won. Those talks produced letters of intent for OpenAI, Samsung, and SK to cooperate on the development of core global AI infrastructure. Samsung SDS had separately become OpenAI's first enterprise reseller partner in Korea in late 2025. Altman's upcoming visit, focused on AI workplace adoption rather than infrastructure, reflects a shift in scope toward Samsung's internal transformation agenda.