Anthropic to open South Korea office as local users surge

Anthropic will open an office in South Korea in early 2026 as it expands in Asia.

Three of its top five global user bases are in Asia: South Korea, Japan, and India.

About 25% of usage for Claude Code, its AI coding tool, comes from Asia, with South Korea as the most active market.

Weekly active users for Claude Code in South Korea have grown 6x in the past four months.

The company is also planning offices in Tokyo and Bengaluru, and hiring in Dublin, London, and Zurich. Anthropic counts SK Telecom, which invested US$100 million in 2023, among its South Korean partners.

The US-based AI startup, known for its Claude models, is backed by Alphabet and Amazon and reportedly valued at US$183 billion.

🔗 Source: Reuters

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

AWS Bedrock adds Seoul for Claude, compliance still unclear

AWS Bedrock is Amazon’s managed service for foundation models. It lists Asia Pacific (Seoul) as a source Region for several Anthropic inference profiles, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude Sonnet 4 1. The company plans a Seoul office in early 2026 2. Neither source covers South Korean data residency or local regulatory approvals that some enterprises may need.
Bedrock offers cross-Region inference profiles 3. The Global profile is callable only from US West or US East 3. Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) also qualify, not Seoul 3. APAC profiles route some requests to Seoul among APAC destination Regions 1. Weekly Claude Code users in Korea grew sixfold 4, but neither source confirms in-country hosting or enterprise compliance commitments.

Anthropic seeks partners, room for Korean SIs pre-2026

The company is searching for partners in Korea, Japan, or India to support clients 2. This creates a path for Korean systems integrators and managed service providers before the Seoul office launch in early 2026 2. SK Telecom put in $100 million in 2023, which signals market interest 2.
Anthropic focuses on enterprise use cases and AI agents, software that performs tasks for people 2. APAC holds over a quarter of Claude Code usage, with weekly Korean users up sixfold 4. Law&Company, a Korean legal-services platform, nearly doubled lawyer efficiency using Claude 4. Early movers can build reference architectures (reusable solution patterns) and capture integration revenue.