Anthropic Raised $100 From South Korean Telecom For Custom LLM

Claude creator, Anthropic, has raised 100 million from South Korean Telecom provider, SK Telecom for a custom LLM. This news comes soon after Anthropic raised substantial capital in its series C round back in May.

According to the press release from SKT, the investment, and partnership with Anthropic will be part of an overall move by the AI company to develop a custom LLM that specifically targets the needs of the telecom industry.

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT, said in a statement, “With our strategic investment in Anthropic, a global leading AI technology company, we will be working closely … to promote AI innovation. By combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem together with our global telco partners.”

According to the same release, this model will include the Claude assistant. Combined with SKT’s existing expertise in telecommunications, and the Korean language, the model being built is expected to support multiple languages such as German, English, and Japanese.

Anthropic’s cofounder and chief science officer is expected to oversee the project which will cover its customization and product roadmap.

Of this partnership, Dario Amodei, cofounder and CEO of Anthropic stated, “SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry. We’re excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry knowledge to build an LLM that is customized for telcos. We see industry-specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology.”

Once SKT’s model is fine-tuned and ready to perform, Anthropic will also work with the telecom giant to integrate the model into the Telco AI Platform that is being built to serve as the core foundation for these new AI-powered services.

Other than improving existing services and digital assistants, the integration will also see new apps and other new services powered by AI. This partnership with SK Telecom is the latest focus in the APAC region. Back in July, Anthropic agreed with Deutsche Telkorn and Singapore Telecommunications to ally to jointly develop AI businesses that are focused on the telecommunications market.

The Telco AI Platform will include members such as SKT, Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel.  All of this comes weeks after Microsoft announced its partnership with the Japanese government to provide generative AI tools specifically aimed at reducing bureaucratic bloat and improving communications between the Diet and agencies.