Anthropic AI raises $100m from South Korea to bolster telecommunications industry

The Google-backed AI developer Anthropic raised $100 million in funding from South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom to bolster industry.

Artificial intelligence (AI) developer Anthropic announced on Aug. 13 that it is receiving an additional $100 million in investment from the South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom. 

According to the announcement, the investment comes alongside a collaboration between the two companies in order to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) for the Telco AI Platform.

The forthcoming LLM will be available in including Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish and aims to allow for the creation of customized AI services for global telecom service providers.

Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said that SKT has “incredible ambitions” to utilize AI to “transform” the way the telecommunications industry functions.

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

Additionally, the companies plan to work together to help “fine tune” Anthropic’s latest model Claude 2, which was released on July 11. 

This development comes as South Korea has been highlighted by leaders in the AI industry as a market positioned for growth, particularly in the area of chip development. 

Related: Anthropic cracks open the black box to see how AI comes up with the stuff it says

Anthropic was founded by former members of the leading AI development company OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft.

In May it closed its Series C funding round in which it raised $450 million from Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures and Zoom Ventures. The company received its first major investment from Google via Google Cloud back in February 2023.

The now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX also invested in Anthropic. At the time of its bankruptcy filing the former exchange’s position was worth around $500 million. 

Anthropic has recently been included in the Biden Administration’s AI cybersecurity challenge it posed to major players in the industry in an effort to protect the United States’ cybersecurity infrastructure.

Additionally, it is a member of the ‘Frontier Model Forum’ along with Google, OpenAI and Microsoft to help regulate AI development.

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