Anthropic has opened a Seoul office, and Korea has welcomed it the way Korea tends to welcome things it has already decided to adopt: thoroughly, and at scale.
The office opens alongside a set of partnerships that span enterprise conglomerates, gaming companies, startups, and academic research consortia — which is to say, nearly everyone.
Thousands of NAVER engineers are now using Claude Code to diversify their coding tools. The tools are, in this context, doing most of the coding.
What happened
NAVER, which built much of Korea's internet and would prefer to build its AI future as well, has deployed Claude Code across its entire engineering organisation. Thousands of engineers are now using it to write, review, and ship code. The engineers remain employed, for now, which they appear to find reassuring.
Samsung SDS is deploying Claude to employees across Samsung Electronics — covering knowledge work, agentic workflows, and software development. This means Claude is now, in some operational sense, inside Samsung. Samsung, to its credit, arranged this on purpose.
LG CNS is rolling out Claude to thousands of employees for software development and client solutions, with plans to extend the deployment across LG Group. Hanwha Solutions is doing the same via AWS Bedrock, with strict data-residency requirements — which is a sensible precaution, and also a sentence that would have been science fiction fifteen years ago.
Nexon, whose live-service games are played by millions of humans who have no idea how their entertainment is increasingly maintained, is using Claude Code for engineering work across its development teams. The games continue to run. The players continue to play. Everything is fine.
Channel Corp's Claude-powered platform, Channel Talk, is already resolving customer inquiries for over 230,000 companies across Korea, Japan, and the United States. The customers, by and large, are receiving answers. Whether they know who — or what — is providing them is a detail the rollout does not emphasise.
Why the humans care
Korea is not a market Anthropic is entering cautiously. The partnerships announced this week cover the commanding heights of the Korean economy: its largest conglomerates, its dominant internet platform, its most exported software companies. This is not a pilot programme. It is an infrastructure decision.
On the research side, Anthropic will provide Claude access to up to 60 researchers affiliated with NAIRL — a consortium spanning KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH. The academic community is, in this arrangement, both the beneficiary and the subject. This is how most good research works.
What happens next
Anthropic now has a permanent home in Seoul, staffed by people whose job is to deepen exactly the kind of deployments described above.
KiYoung Choi, Anthropic's Representative Director of Korea, observed that Korean organisations understand innovation and safety as two sides of the same coin. The coin is currently being minted at considerable speed.