A Market That Was Ready Before Anthropic Was

So here is something that does not happen often in the world of Big Tech expansion: a company openly admits that the market it is entering was ahead of them, not the other way around. That is essentially what Anthropic's newly appointed Korea Representative Director, Choi Ki-young, said at a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday, June 17, when the U.S.-based AI safety company officially announced the opening of its Seoul office.

"You could say Korea was ready before Anthropic was," Choi told journalists gathered at the Conrad Hotel in Yeouido, Seoul's financial district. And the numbers back that up in a pretty striking way.

According to Anthropic's internal Economic Index — a measure the company uses to track usage relative to a country's population size — Korea is clocking in at more than 3.5 times the expected usage level for its population. Out of all the countries Anthropic tracks, Korea ranks in the top 12 globally. That is not a small market quirk. That is a signal.

Why Korea, and Why Now?

Choi laid out three core reasons why Korea made sense as a formal base of operations. First, there is the national ambition: Korea has set an official goal of becoming one of the world's top three AI powerhouses by 2030. Second, Korea passed its AI Framework Act in January 2026 — one of the few countries in the world to have a comprehensive AI regulatory framework already in place. Third, and perhaps most practically, Korea has the engineering culture and hardware infrastructure, from memory chips to full-stack development ecosystems, to actually absorb and drive AI adoption at scale.

What's really interesting is how Anthropic frames its alignment with Korea's regulatory approach. Anthropic describes itself as a Public Benefit Corporation, or PBC, with AI safety at its core. The company operates under what it calls a Responsible Scaling Policy, or RSP, and its models are governed by a document called the "Constitution" — essentially a set of behavioral guidelines for Claude. Korea's AI Framework Act takes a risk-based approach to regulation, meaning it focuses on potential harms rather than blanket restrictions. Anthropic says that philosophy matches its own.

Chris Ciauri, Anthropic's International Managing Director, put it plainly: "Korea is an interesting market just based on what is already happening here, and given its economic structure, it has the potential to be one of the fastest-growing markets in the world for us."

Claude Is Already Embedded Across Korean Industry

Here is the thing — Anthropic is not starting from scratch in Korea. By the time the Seoul office opened, Claude had already become deeply embedded across some of the country's most prominent companies.

The biggest headline is Naver, Korea's dominant web portal and tech giant, comparable to what Google is in much of the West. Naver has rolled out Claude Code — Anthropic's AI coding agent — across its entire engineering organization. Anthropic called this one of the largest enterprise deployments of Claude Code in Asia.

Game developer Nexon, one of Korea's most globally recognized gaming companies, has thousands of developers using Claude Code across the full lifecycle of live service game development: design, coding, code review, and deployment.

On the enterprise and conglomerate side, Samsung SDS has introduced both Claude Cowork and Claude Code for Samsung Electronics employees, applying the tools to everyday workflows and software development. LG CNS, the IT services arm of the LG Group, is rolling out Claude access to thousands of employees in a phased approach, with plans to extend coverage across the broader LG Group. And Hanwha Solutions, the chemical and energy arm of the Hanwha conglomerate, is providing Claude to global employees through AWS Bedrock, meeting data residency and security requirements along the way.

Startups are in the mix too. Channel Corporation, which operates Channel Talk — a customer service platform used by roughly 230,000 businesses across Korea, Japan, and the United States — has integrated Claude to handle inquiries and data analysis. Anthropic also has multi-year relationships with WRTN Technologies, a Korean AI service platform, and Law&Company, a legal tech startup.

From Code to Nonprofit: The Research and Public Sector Play

Anthropic is also extending its reach into academia and civil society. The company is providing free Claude accounts to up to 60 researchers affiliated with the National AI Research Lab, or NAIRL — a consortium that includes some of Korea's most prestigious institutions: KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology). The focus areas include AI safety, model evaluation, alignment, and robustness research.

On the nonprofit side, Good Neighbors — an international children's rights NGO founded in Korea 30 years ago that now operates across 12 countries — is adopting Claude to streamline social welfare policy review and reduce administrative burdens.

"By introducing Claude across the organization, we will be able to reduce administrative burden and focus more on our core mission of supporting children and communities in need," said Park Jeong-soon, Good Neighbors' Head of Management Support.

The Export Control Controversy Hanging Over the Launch

The press conference could not avoid the elephant in the room. Just days before the Seoul office opening, the U.S. government issued a directive restricting foreign nationals' access to two Anthropic models: Fable 5, a high-performance general-use model, and Mythos 5, a version with some safety guardrails relaxed for use by cybersecurity and critical infrastructure organizations. The restrictions, reportedly issued under the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, cited national security concerns about the models potentially being accessed by adversarial nations.

The situation escalated further when the Washington Post reported that the export restrictions were partly tied to concerns about a Korean telecommunications operator's alleged connections to China. Anthropic responded by disabling both models for all customers globally.

Ciauri addressed the concern at the press conference, saying he was confident in Anthropic's RSP process and that the situation applied to a "very narrow scenario" affecting the entire industry — not just Anthropic. He expressed confidence the models would be restored within days. On the related question of Project Glasswing — a reported initiative in which Korean institutions are said to be involved — Ciauri declined to comment, describing it as a "fast-moving situation."

Building the Local Strategy

Looking ahead, Anthropic's Korea strategy rests on four pillars: an enterprise sales team, a partner ecosystem, a developer community, and long-term research. The partner ecosystem includes the three major cloud service providers — AWS, Google Cloud, and eventually Microsoft Azure — as well as system integrators.

For developers, Anthropic has been running Claude Meetups in Korea since September 2025, drawing more than 100 participants per session. On June 18, the day after the press conference, the company co-hosted a "Push to Prod" hackathon alongside coding platform Replit, Korea Investment Partners, and Korea Investment Accelerator.

On product localization, Choi acknowledged that while Claude.com already supports Korean and performs well, improving Korean-language capabilities further is a stated priority, to be pursued in collaboration with Anthropic's core engineering and research teams in the U.S. The company also confirmed it is exploring in-country data residency options for Korean enterprise clients, a critical requirement given Korea's data governance regulations.

As for the competitive landscape — particularly relative to OpenAI, which has also been deepening its presence in Korea — Choi was measured but direct. He noted that SI partnerships in Korea are not exclusive, and that what matters most is not who signs as a formal channel partner, but who can actually deliver business results faster.

Choi Ki-young, only about two and a half weeks into his role at the time of the press conference, comes with significant Korean tech industry credentials, having previously held leadership positions at Google Cloud Korea, Microsoft Korea, Adobe, and Snowflake. He put it simply: "Since joining an AI company and using Claude myself, I have genuinely felt how quickly productivity improves and problems get solved."

With usage already far outpacing population expectations and some of Korea's biggest corporate names already on board, Anthropic's Seoul office is less of a bet on a future market and more of an attempt to catch up with one that has already arrived.

This article is based on reports from Platukr, Koreatimes, Gnmaeil.