SK Telecom to invest $100 mn in US AI firm Anthropic

SEOUL:SK Telecom, South Korea's largest wireless carrier, said it will invest $100 million in the US artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic in a partnership deal to expand its footprint in the AI sector.

Anthropic is a San Francisco-based AI safety and research company, with products like the AI assistant Claude. It was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, the operator of ChatGPT.

SK Telecom said it planned to collaborate with Anthropic to develop an AI platform, as well as a large language model (LLM) that supports various languages, including Korean, English, German and Japanese, reports Yonhap news agency.

Anthropic's chief scientist and co-founder Jared Kaplan will lead the development of a new LLM, SK Telecom said.

Based on the collaboration, SK Telecom plans to bolster its own LLM model to better and more efficiently serve customers' needs.

Last month, SK Telecom signed an agreement with Deutsche Telekom, & and Singtel to form the global Telco AI Alliance "to accelerate AI transformation of the existing telco business and create new business opportunities with AI services."

SK Telecom said the new partnership with Anthropic is expected to help accelerate multilateral efforts to develop the Telco AI Platform.

"We aim to take a leading role in fostering an AI ecosystem jointly with global telecommunication companies, based on SKT's AI technologies specialized in Korean and Anthropics' global AI competence," SK Telecom CEO Ryu Young-sang said.

Following the launch of the Global Telco AI Alliance, SKT partners with Anthropic to promote AI innovation and secure a competitive edge.

SKT makes an additional $100 million investment in Anthropic – which follows the previous investment from SKTVC -- and signs a partnership agreement with the company.

SKT and Anthropic will develop a multilingual large language model for the Telco AI Platform, which will allow for the creation of customized AI services for global telcos.