Anthropic to open South Korea office as part of Asia expansion

SINGAPORE -Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic will open an office in South Korea, as it ramps up its Asia expansion, a top executive said on Thursday. “Out of the top five (Anthropic) users globally, three are in Asia: Korea, Japan, and India,” Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith told Reuters in an interview.  He said that 25% of the overall usage of its AI coding tool, Claude Code, happens in Asia, with the most active user being in South Korea. The company said the number of Claude Code active weekly users in Korea had grown sixfold in the last four months. The move comes on the heels of a large-scale global expansion by Anthropic to triple its international workforce to meet a rise in demand for its Claude AI large language models outside the United States. “That growth is going to accelerate in 2026,” Smith said. “We’re focused on the enterprise business and we’re now just approaching $7 billion of revenue," referring to the company's annualized revenue run rate. The AI startup is racing rivals to build models that can reliably operate software and complete multi-step work, key for AI agents, which can perform tasks on behalf of humans. Anthropic’s AI model Claude now has more than 300,000 enterprise customers, with nearly 80% of usage coming from outside the U.S. Smith said the startup will open its Seoul office in early 2026, while already providing services to partners like SK Telecom, which invested $100 million in the startup in 2023. The Alphabet and Amazon.com-backed  AI firm, valued at $183 billion, already announced plans to open offices in Tokyo and the Indian tech hub of Bengaluru and is hiring for over 100 roles in Dublin, London, and Zurich. The executive told Reuters that Anthropic is searching for local partners in all three Asian markets to support clients and that a further expansion is expected to include an office in Australia. (Reporting by Fanny Potkin in Singapore; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

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