AI Startup Anthropic Bags $100M From South Korean Telecom Giant Amid Sector's Rise

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI leaders, secured a $100 million investment from South Korean telecommunications behemoth, SK Telecom Co Ltd SKM.

The announcement came three months after Anthropic’s Series C funding round led by Spark Capital which raised $450 million.

SK Telecom’s strategic investment highlights its plans to partner with Anthropic in crafting a multilingual large language model tailored for international telecommunications corporations, according to Tech Crunch.

The model aims to provide customized AI solutions for Global Telco AI Alliance members such as Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel. The solutions will cater to the nuanced requirements of their specific markets in languages spanning English, Korean, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish, Tech Crunch said.

Anthropic’s LLM: Launched in 2021 and principally founded by Daniela and Dario Amodei, Anthropic has been sculpting an AI system, Claude, comparable to OpenAI's Chat GPT. The system enables businesses to streamline search functions, automation, coding and various other tasks.

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SK Telecom’s CEO Ryu Young-sang expressed optimism about melding Korean language-oriented LLMs (large language models) with Anthropic's AI capabilities to spearhead the AI ecosystem, the report said.

AI Fever Spreading Globally: AI's leap into mainstream industries hasn’t escaped the keen eye of celebrities. Actor and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher underscored an undeniable opportunity in AI, raising $243 million earlier this year to invest in various AI startups.

Kutcher, with a proven investment track record in tech unicorns such as Airbnb, Uber and Spotify, is bullish about AI’s potential to revolutionize sectors including education, medicine and law.

Similarly, Alphabet Inc's GOOG GOOGL $300 million investment in Anthropic to secure roughly a 10% stake underscores Google's resolve to remain a frontrunner in the AI race.

Potential Pitfalls? In the venture capital world, investments come with their own baggage.

Google’s affiliation with Anthropic, backed by the now-defunct FTX platform, raised eyebrows with speculation about the dubious origins of FTX’s funds potentially being channeled into Anthropic.

Still, the AI industry continues its meteoric rise, with big players such as SK Telecom entering the fray and pioneers Kutcher and Anthropic championing its cause.

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