Anthropic Opens a Seoul Office With NAVER, Samsung SDS and LG CNS Already Building on Claude

Anthropic is putting down roots in Seoul. On June 17 the company opened a dedicated Korea office, led by Representative Director KiYoung Choi, and unveiled a sweep of partnerships that reads like a who's-who of Korean tech — a sign of how quickly Claude has moved from developer favorite to enterprise default in one of its fastest-growing markets.

The anchor is NAVER, Korea's search and internet giant, which has rolled out Claude Code across its entire engineering organization — thousands of developers now coding with Claude day to day. It is a notable vote of confidence from a company that is simultaneously building its own gigawatt-scale sovereign-AI infrastructure, and a reminder that "build your own" and "buy the best model" are no longer either-or bets.

Beyond NAVER, Anthropic named a deep bench of enterprise adopters: Samsung SDS and LG CNS, the IT arms of two of Korea's largest conglomerates, are deploying Claude to thousands of employees; gaming powerhouse Nexon and energy-and-chemicals group Hanwha Solutions are on board; and startups including WRTN, Law&Company, and Channel Corp — whose Channel Talk product serves 230,000-plus companies — are building Claude into their own products. Anthropic is also backing a National AI Research Lab consortium spanning KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei, and POSTECH, supporting roughly 60 researchers, plus a partnership with child-rights nonprofit Good Neighbors Korea.

The expansion fits a pattern BitsMinds has tracked all year: Anthropic chasing high-value, safety-conscious institutional demand market by market, much as it did when Japan's megabanks gained access to Claude through a brokered sovereign arrangement. Korea already ranks among the top dozen countries for Claude.ai usage and hosts one of Anthropic's most active developer communities — exactly the kind of beachhead a company races to formalize ahead of a public listing.

Choi framed the move in Anthropic's familiar register, telling the announcement: "What I see in Korea are teams who understand that innovation and safety are two sides of the same coin." The pitch lands differently in a region where every major lab is competing for the same conglomerates — and where a physical office, local leadership, and university funding are the table stakes for being taken seriously by Samsung-scale buyers.