SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - Major United States artificial intelligence developers are accelerating their business expansion into South Korea, establishing local offices and recruiting skilled workers as they target the country’s enterprise and public sector markets.
According to industry sources on Thursday, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has recently relocated the address of its South Korean entity to a shared office space in Seoul's southern district of Gangnam, also the capital's heart of finance and technology. The firm previously announced the formation of a South Korean corporation and began hiring locally.
OpenAI is currently finalizing the appointment of its Head of OpenAI Korea. Once the position is filled, the company is expected to hold an official launch event for OpenAI Korea as early as next month. The local team is projected to include around 10 employees.
In May, OpenAI began hiring for account director positions, as well as roles in client support, solutions engineering, and solution architecture, among others.
Anthropic, the developer of Claude and widely seen as a key rival to OpenAI, also recently established a Korean entity under the name Anthropic Korea, marking the start of its formal entry into the Korean market. Although Anthropic has yet to open a physical office in South Korea, industry watchers expect the company to set up local operations by the end of the year.
Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, said the company plans to begin making significant investments in the Asia-Pacific region this year, during "Amazon Web Services (AWS) Unicorn Day 2025" held in March at COEX, a major exhibition and conference hub complex in Seoul.
While OpenAI’s models are widely recognized for their strengths in text generation and summarization, Claude has shown strength in "vibe coding," where the AI autonomously writes code, gaining traction in the enterprise AI model market.
South Korea is currently the second-largest market for paid ChatGPT subscriptions globally, and also ranks among the top five countries for enterprise (ChatGPT for Teams) usage. This highlights Korea’s rapid adoption of AI technologies in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) domains.
An AI industry expert said, "Korea may have a relatively small population and thus a limited consumer market, but it is one of the most proactive countries when it comes to adopting AI to drive real-world results. That’s why it’s increasingly being seen as a proving ground for AI in the broader Asia-Pacific region."
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