Among South Korea's industries, finance and healthcare are considered the toughest sectors for foreign artificial intelligence (AI) companies to break into, as they handle the most sensitive personal data. Anthropic's planned Seoul in-region support is seen as a signal of its intent to clear these high barriers and leave no gap anywhere in Korea's business-to-business (B2B) market. With OpenAI, which landed earlier, already delivering visible results in sales to large corporations and the public sector, a struggle for dominance among global AI companies over the Korean market appears inevitable.
According to industry sources on the 22nd, the Seoul in-region support has been pursued in tandem with the official opening of Anthropic's Korean office. Anthropic appointed its Korea head this month, formally launching its push into the domestic B2B market. Chris Ciauri, head of Anthropic International, and Choi Ki-young, Anthropic's Korea head, said at a press conference on the 17th that they are reviewing data storage and processing options tailored to Korea's regulatory environment.
This timing also coincides with the point at which the U.S. administration fully blocked foreign access to Anthropic's next-generation Claude models, including "Fable5" and "Mythos5." Although the U.S. government took the unprecedented step of imposing export controls on AI models, Anthropic has not relented in its stance of global business expansion. On the Korean market, Ciauri said, "Korea is a country with a strong national-level AI vision and AI regulation, which aligns well with Anthropic's founding goal of providing humanity with a safe AI experience."
Taken together, the Seoul in-region support can be seen as a move to step first into regulated industries and preempt the experience of using Claude. The core targets are finance and healthcare. Both sectors must comply with cloud server usage guidelines under electronic finance supervision regulations and electronic medical record management standards, respectively, and both frameworks restrict the physical location of cloud servers used by financial firms and medical institutions to within the country.
For this reason, if a financial firm or medical institution entrusts sensitive information to a global AI service that processes data at overseas data centers, it constitutes a regulatory violation. This is because global AI companies, including Anthropic, provide services using data centers scattered around the world. An official at a domestic AI model developer said, "In finance and healthcare settings, there are many cases where AI services based on domestic data centers are adopted first, due to IT systems and information storage regulations."
OpenAI, which planted its flag in Korea first last year, is expanding its customer base in both the B2B and public sectors simultaneously. In corporate sales, it has signed partnership agreements with major system integration (SI) firms such as Samsung SDS (018260), LG CNS (064400), and SK AX, and sells enterprise ChatGPT through them. LG Electronics (066570), GS E&C (006360), Krafton (259960), and Hana Tour (039130) have adopted and are using it.
Notably, OpenAI is also putting effort into the public sector. OpenAI recently signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with the Korea Water Resources Corporation and the Korea Technology Finance Corporation. The Korea Water Resources Corporation is reviewing ways to preemptively respond to natural disasters such as floods and droughts using OpenAI's technology, while the Korea Technology Finance Corporation is examining ways to use AI in evaluating startup business models.
OpenAI's pioneering of public-sector projects is interpreted as a strategy aimed at securing long-term customers rather than immediate revenue. The CEO of one AI service startup analyzed, "It is aiming for a lock-in effect by instilling ChatGPT usage experience early on among millions of employees at public institutions and state-owned enterprises nationwide, making them prefer only OpenAI's tools thereafter."
Google, which leads with Gemini, entered the B2B contract race a step later than Anthropic and OpenAI. Last year, it officially launched Gemini Enterprise, an enterprise AI platform. Although it has not yet marketed aggressively, it has succeeded in securing client firms. Samsung Electronics (005930) adopted Gemini, along with ChatGPT and Claude, as generative AI for employee work, and KakaoBank (323410) and CJ Olive Young are also attempting internal work AI transformation (AX) with Gemini Enterprise. Though a latecomer in B2B, Google touts its integration with Google Workspace, an enterprise collaboration tool, and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as strengths.
