Anthropic opens Seoul office and signs AI safety MOU with South Korea's MSIT

Anthropic opened its Seoul office and announced new partnerships across the Korean AI ecosystem on June 17, naming KiYoung Choi as representative director of its Korea operation. Alongside the opening, South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) said it signed an AI safety memorandum of understanding with the company.

The move lands days after a setback in Washington. On June 12, a U.S. government export-control directive halted foreign-national access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, the development this thread has tracked. The Seoul opening is the company's first concrete step toward a foreign government since that order.

Under the MOU, MSIT said it and Anthropic would work on AI safety, analysis of AI's impact on cyber offense and defense, safety and misuse evaluation of models in Korean-language settings, and red-team testing of autonomous AI agents. The agreement follows February talks between South Korean Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei at the 2026 AI Action Summit in India.

Anthropic said it will provide Claude to as many as 60 researchers in a National AI Research Lab consortium that includes KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei, and POSTECH. It listed Korean partners including SK Telecom, LG CNS, NAVER, Samsung SDS, Hanwha Solutions, Channel Corp, and WRTN.

SK Telecom's place on that list is notable because, according to earlier reporting on the export-control trigger, its participation in Anthropic's Glasswing security initiative was tied to the order; that account has not been confirmed in detail by Anthropic or the U.S. government, and SK Telecom has disputed the related claims. The link between the Korea push and the June 12 order remains a matter of timing and reporting, not a stated cause.

Whether the partnerships hold under U.S. export rules is the open question. The deals are announced; what Korean researchers and companies can actually access, given the restrictions on Fable 5 and Mythos 5, is not yet clear.