US AI Startup Anthropic to Establish Korean Branch... "Will Make Full-Scale Investments in the Asia-Pacific Region"

Anthropic, a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, is increasing its investments in the Asia-Pacific region, including South Korea.

Kate Jensen, Head of Revenue at Anthropic, said at the opening session of the 'Korea Builder Summit' held on the 19th at Signiel in Songpa-gu, Seoul, "We came to Korea to support companies in solving problems through the AI model 'Claude,'" adding, "This year will be the first year of full-scale investment in the Asia-Pacific region, and we plan to establish a branch office in Korea."

Yonhap News

The event was co-hosted by Coxwave, a Korean startup providing a large language model (LLM) monitoring and analysis platform, and Anthropic. This was Anthropic's first event held in Korea. Coxwave explained that the event was organized to introduce Anthropic's research achievements, including Claude's capabilities, to Korea and to increase connections between Anthropic and Korean companies.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, is a U.S. AI startup that focuses on the large language model (LLM) Claude as its main product. It gained recognition after securing an $8 billion (approximately 11.6 trillion KRW) investment from Amazon.

At the event, Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer (CPO), introduced the latest model, 'Claude 3.7 Sonnet.' This model is a hybrid inference model, with strengths in advanced coding capabilities and specialization in collaboration with humans. CPO Krieger said, "I heard that Claude uses Korean well and that not only Korean B2B (business-to-business) companies but also B2C (business-to-consumer) companies use Claude extensively," adding, "We hope to receive a lot of feedback to improve the model so that it can use Korean even better."

Anthropic shared opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of using Claude and the characteristics of the Korean market through a panel discussion with Lee Yeop, Director of Coxwave; Lee Dongjae, CPO of Lytton; Choi Hojun, Co-CEO of LinkAlpha; and Kang Jisoo, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Cleon. In the latter part of the event, an 'AI Innovation Leadership' session was held with technical leaders from SK Telecom, Rhyner, and Law&Company participating as panelists.

Meanwhile, global big tech companies continue to enter the Korean market through partnerships with domestic firms. In February, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, visited Korea and announced a strategic partnership with Kakao, and in September last year, Microsoft (MS) signed a strategic partnership with KT.