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Deployments

Anthropic opens Seoul office as Samsung SDS, LG CNS and Naver wire Claude into the chaebols

The launch lands the same week a US export-control order pulled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from Korean customers — a freeze Anthropic says it can lift in days.

By Ben Krauss · Daily desk lead ·

Anthropic opened its Seoul office on Wednesday, its third Asia-Pacific outpost after Tokyo and Bengaluru, and announced a stack of chaebol deployments that read as a near-complete capture of Korean enterprise AI. Samsung SDS is pushing Claude across Samsung Electronics for knowledge work and software development. LG CNS is rolling it out to thousands of employees with plans to extend across LG Group. Naver, per TechTimes, has put Claude Code across its entire engineering organization, characterized as one of the largest enterprise adoptions in Asia. Nexon is using Claude Code inside live-service games. Hanwha Solutions is serving Claude to global staff through AWS Bedrock with in-region data residency.

The launch also brought an MOU with Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT on AI safety, and Claude accounts for up to 60 researchers via the NAIRL consortium spanning KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei and POSTECH. Korea Times reports Korea now ranks 12th of 166 Claude markets, and is expected to enter the top 10.

The awkward part: on June 12, a US export-control directive barred foreign nationals from Mythos 5 and Fable 5 on national-security grounds. Anthropic disabled both models worldwide, citing the difficulty of enforcing selective access on shared cloud. The Washington Post tied the order to a Korean telecom’s alleged China ties; WIRED named SK Telecom, which has denied any such links. SK Telecom’s access to Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s cybersecurity program spanning roughly 150 organizations across more than 15 countries, was reportedly revoked.

“We will continue discussions with the US government to address this issue, and we believe it will be resolved soon. We do not expect any long-term impact,” said Chris Ciauri, Anthropic’s international managing director. Per Reuters, senior technical staff including training and inference lead Sam Brown have stayed in Washington to brief officials.

The numbers underneath explain the urgency on both ends. Anthropic closed 2025 at $9 billion in revenue and, per Ciauri, hit $47 billion as of a few weeks ago. A capability moat that compounds that fast doesn’t tolerate a Seoul launch week where the flagship models can’t be sold to the customers in the room.

Sources