Anthropic, an AI Startup, Secures $100M Investment from South Korean Telecom Leader SK Telecom

AI Startup Anthropic Gets $100M Boost from SK Telecom

Anthropic, an AI company started by former OpenAI leaders, has secured $100 million from South Korea’s major mobile carrier, SK Telecom (SKT). This comes on the heels of a $450 million funding round three months ago. SKT had also chipped in during that round via its venture capital division, SK Telecom Venture Capital. Recently, the German software firm SAP invested in Anthropic too.

SKT’s investment is a strategic move into the rapidly growing generative AI market. They plan to work with Anthropic to create a multilingual large language model (LLM) aimed at global telecom companies. Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, will oversee this venture.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, expressed excitement about merging their AI knowledge with SKT’s deep understanding of the telecom sector. This partnership aims to design a specialized LLM for telecom businesses.

This new LLM will enable Global Telco AI Alliance members, like Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel, to roll out AI solutions tailored to their local users. The model will support six languages: English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish.

Anthropic, founded in 2021, is behind the AI system “Claude”. Similar to OpenAI’s Chat GPT, Claude assists businesses with various tasks like searching, answering questions, and automating workflows. A recent update to Claude was released, introducing features from its second-generation chatbot.

SKT highlights that Claude will be valuable for telecoms in customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive apps. SKT’s CEO, Ryu Young-sang, believes that by blending SKT’s LLM with Anthropic’s AI, they will strengthen their AI leadership in collaboration with global telco partners.

Further updates on this story are expected.