South Korea eyes AI partnership with Anthropic

South Korea’s government is broadening its AI cooperation beyond OpenAI by pursuing policy ties with Anthropic, and the Ministry of Science and ICT is reviewing a possible MOU after talks at the 2026 AI Impact Summit, according to industry sources.

Bae Kyung-hoon, deputy prime minister, met Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic, in New Delhi and discussed Anthropic’s plans for a Seoul office and cooperation on shifts in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market following the emergence of Claude Code.

Anthropic had announced plans to open a Gangnam office earlier this year.

The ministry has until now focused its global AI ties on OpenAI after an MOU last year with Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, on building a domestic AI ecosystem, public-sector AI adoption, and talent development.

Company data showed South Korea ranked in the top five globally for Claude usage and per-capita usage.

Officials have warned against overreliance on single firms for procurement and standards, and the government is pursuing a dual-track strategy that prioritizes a sovereign AI foundation model for sensitive sectors while cooperating with global companies.

🔗 Source: Chosun Daily

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

The sovereign AI strategy runs as a government-backed national project

South Korea’s sovereign AI foundation model is a government program that picked five ‘elite teams’ under the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT)’s ‘Sovereign AI Foundation Model’ project 1.
The selected groups include Naver Cloud, Naver’s cloud unit, and SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest mobile carrier 1.
MSIT plans to back the teams with shared data access, joint procurement, datasets from public bodies such as the National Archives of Korea, plus graphics processing unit (GPU) support and related arrangements 1.
Ha Jung-woo, who previously led Naver’s HyperCLOVA X effort, the company’s large language model, later joined government as senior presidential secretary for AI future planning 2.

Korea’s AI plan puts local champions alongside global players, with debate over ‘from scratch’ rules

The government has courted firms like Anthropic, while the sovereign AI program has drawn debate over what counts as a ‘sovereign’ or ‘independent’ model 3.
Critics have questioned the project’s ‘from scratch’ framing after reports that Naver used an ‘encoder’, a component that turns text into numerical representations a model can learn from, from China’s Qwen, a family of AI models 3.
The stakes run high since national AI systems may support public services plus sensitive areas such as defense and finance, which raises concerns about reliance on foreign components 3.
The result is a crowded field where state-backed teams, global tech firms, and domestic AI startups, including companies that already sell to government and public institutions, compete for contracts 4.