SK Telecom Invests $100 Million in Anthropic’s AI Development

The artificial intelligence (AI) developer Anthropic announced on August 13 that it will receive an additional $100 million investment from the South Korean telecommunications behemoth SK Telecom.

The investment is accompanied by a partnership between the two firms to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) for the Telco AI Platform.

The forthcoming LLM will be available in Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish, among other languages, and seeks to facilitate the creation of AI services tailored to the needs of global telecom service providers.

The co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, stated that SKT has “incredible ambitions” to use AI to “transform” the telecommunications industry.

“We see industry-specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology.”

In addition, the companies intend to collaborate to “fine-tune” Anthropic’s Claude 2 model, which was released on July 11.

South Korea has been identified by leaders in the artificial intelligence industry as a market poised for growth, particularly in the area of semiconductor development.

Anthropic was founded by former employees of OpenAI, the premier AI development firm backed by Microsoft. In May, it closed a $450 million Series C funding round with Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, and Zoom Ventures.

In February 2023, the company received its first significant investment from Google via Google Cloud. Additionally, the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX invested in Anthropic.

Before filing for bankruptcy, the FTX exchange’s position was valued at approximately $500 million.

To protect the United States cybersecurity infrastructure, the Biden Administration recently included Anthropic in the AI cybersecurity challenge it issued to the industry’s main players.

In addition, it is a member of the ‘Frontier Model Forum’ alongside Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft to help regulate the development of artificial intelligence.