Anthropic opens Seoul AI office
Anthropic opened a Seoul office on June 17 and named NAVER, Samsung SDS, LG CNS and Nexon among Korean firms now running Claude Code at scale.
On June 17 Anthropic opened an office in Seoul, its third in Asia-Pacific after Tokyo and Bengaluru, and named a roster of Korean companies already running its tools. NAVER has thousands of engineers using Claude Code; Samsung SDS is deploying Claude across Samsung Electronics; and LG CNS, Nexon, Hanwha Solutions and Channel Corp, which serves more than 230,000 businesses through its Channel Talk platform, are all listed as customers. The office is led by KiYoung Choi, the former head of Snowflake Korea.
Anthropic also signed a memorandum with Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT covering AI safety, cybersecurity and Korean-language model evaluation, and said it will give Claude to up to 60 researchers across a national lab consortium that spans KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei and POSTECH.
Why this matters
The headline is not the office, it is the customer list. When NAVER, Samsung’s IT arm and LG’s put coding agents in front of thousands of engineers, that says something about where serious software teams now think these tools sit. If you are still treating coding agents as experimental, the buyers above are not.
The timing is pointed. Anthropic is expanding in Korea even as Washington restricts exports of its top models. The practical read for operators: Claude Code keeps gaining enterprise ground, and deployments like Hanwha’s, run through AWS Bedrock with in-region data controls, show the compliance path others will copy. Just keep watching the terms, the way the paused Agent SDK billing change showed they can shift under you.