Anthropic opened its Seoul office on June 17 — and it didn’t show up empty-handed. The launch came with a whole bundle of new partnerships across the Korean economy. The office is led by KiYoung Choi, who brings three decades of experience running technology businesses in Korea.
NAVER, Nexon and the developers
The most interesting part sits with developers. NAVER — Korea’s big cloud and search company — has rolled out Claude Code across its entire engineering organization. Thousands of NAVER engineers now use it to diversify their coding tools and ship faster. At game studio Nexon, teams use it to write, review and ship code for live-service games played by millions.
That’s exactly the pattern Anthropic is riding worldwide right now: Claude Code becoming the default tool for whole engineering departments, not just a handful of early adopters.
The big conglomerates are in
Korea’s largest business groups are deploying Claude too. LG CNS, LG’s IT arm, is bringing Claude to thousands of staff — and plans to extend it across the wider LG Group. Samsung SDS is deploying Claude, including Cowork and Claude Code, across Samsung Electronics. Hanwha Solutions is bringing Claude to its workforce through AWS Bedrock, meeting strict data-residency and security requirements.
On the startup side, Channel Corp builds Claude straight into Channel Talk, a customer-service platform used by more than 230,000 companies across Korea, Japan and the US.
Research and nonprofits
Anthropic is reaching beyond business as well. Through the National AI Research Lab (NAIRL) — a consortium spanning KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei and POSTECH — up to 60 researchers get Claude access for work on AI safety, alignment and robustness. And the NGO Good Neighbors Korea is using Claude to free social workers from administrative load.
My take
Seoul is no accident. According to Anthropic’s own Economic Index, Korea ranks among the top countries for Claude usage, and its developer community is one of the most active anywhere. While the export fight over Fable 5 and the run of outages dominate the headlines, this move shows the other side of the story: the enterprise and developer business keeps growing regardless — and Anthropic is now building local presence to match. When a country like Korea puts NAVER and Samsung behind Claude Code, that’s a strong signal to the rest of Asia.
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