Anthropic Opens a Seoul Office: Claude Rolls Out at Samsung and LG

On June 17, 2026, Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, opened an office in Seoul. It is the firm’s third location in the Asia-Pacific region after Tokyo and Bengaluru. The news might seem distant from a business in Trois-Rivières or Quebec City, but it says something concrete about the place Claude is taking in the working world.

The telling part is not the office itself, it is what came with it. On the same day, Anthropic confirmed that giants such as Samsung, LG and Hanwha are rolling Claude out to thousands of their employees. In other words, the tool is no longer confined to trials: it is entering the daily routine of very large organizations, for writing code, drafting documents and managing knowledge.

1. What Anthropic announced in Seoul

The Seoul opening comes with several agreements covering both the public and private sectors. According to Anthropic, the new office is led by KiYoung Choi, who brings some thirty years of running technology companies in Korea. Korea is in fact among the ten countries where Claude.ai sees the heaviest use, mostly for technical and creative work.

Here are the main points of the announcement:

• An agreement with the government: Anthropic signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT to advance AI safety.
• Research partnerships: up to 60 researchers affiliated with a university consortium (including KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei and POSTECH) will get access to Claude to work on alignment, model evaluation and robustness.
• A wider regional presence: Seoul becomes Anthropic’s third office in Asia-Pacific, a sign that the company is structuring its growth outside the United States.

2. Samsung, LG and Hanwha deploy Claude at scale

The most interesting part of the announcement is the real corporate rollouts. These are not quiet pilot projects any more, they are deployments to thousands of people. According to Anthropic, three cases stand out:

• LG CNS is rolling Claude out to thousands of employees for software development, with the intention of extending it across the whole LG group.
• Samsung SDS is putting Claude in the hands of Samsung Electronics employees, including Claude Cowork and Claude Code, for day-to-day knowledge work and software development.
• Hanwha Solutions is making Claude available to employees internationally by going through AWS Bedrock, in order to meet strict data residency and security requirements.

That last detail deserves attention. Hanwha is not simply switching a tool on: the company chose a path that keeps data in a specific region, with tight security controls. That is exactly the reflex a smaller business should have before opening AI up to its team. Where does the data go, who can reach it, and under what rules? At OKTO Solutions, that kind of framing is part of our managed IT services.

3. Why this news matters to a Quebec business

When organizations the size of Samsung and LG decide to put Claude in the hands of thousands of employees, the message is simple: conversational AI is no longer a novelty, it has become a standard productivity tool. And what starts in large enterprises almost always reaches smaller companies, often faster than people expect.

In practical terms, a small business can draw several lessons from these deployments:

• Use will spread, governed or not. Your employees may already be using an AI assistant to draft email or summarize documents. Guided use beats improvised use.
• Data is the real issue. Hanwha’s decision to go through infrastructure with data residency is a reminder that a business needs to know where its sensitive information travels, especially with Quebec’s Law 25 in force.
• The time savings are real. Code, writing, knowledge management: every company does this work, whatever its size.

The right move is neither to ban AI nor to adopt it without thinking, but to set clear rules: which tools are allowed, which data must never be copied into them, and who reviews the output. If you want to build that policy without spending your evenings on it, write to us through our contact page.

4. The backdrop: export controls in play

One piece of context reported by several outlets, including UPI and the Korea Times, is worth noting. The Seoul office opened while American export restrictions were limiting Korea’s access to Anthropic’s most advanced models. A few days earlier, the company had to suspend access to its top-tier models following a government directive.

Anthropic is therefore pressing ahead in Korea while working around those limits. For a business, the lesson is less geopolitical than practical: an AI tool’s availability can change overnight because of decisions you have no control over. That is a good reason never to depend on a single vendor for a critical process, and to always keep a fallback plan.

Frequently asked questions

What is Claude, Anthropic’s AI?

Claude is an artificial intelligence assistant built by Anthropic. It writes, summarizes, analyzes documents, produces code and answers questions, a little like a digital colleague you reach by text.

Why did Anthropic open an office in Seoul?

To be closer to its Korean partners and customers. Korea is one of the countries where Claude sees the heaviest use, and large companies such as Samsung and LG are rolling the tool out to thousands of employees.

Can a small business use Claude safely?

Yes, provided its use is governed: define what data can be entered, choose a suitable plan and train your employees. An IT partner can help you put those boundaries in place, especially where Law 25 applies.

Adopt AI without losing control of your data

Claude’s arrival inside some of the world’s largest companies confirms an underlying trend: AI is becoming an ordinary work tool. The real question for a smaller business is no longer whether it will use AI, but how to govern it so the benefits arrive without exposing its data. Our team can help you choose the right tools and set clear rules, the way we do in our managed IT services. To talk it through with a human, write to us on our contact page.