Anthropic Korea has been operating for 8 months, but the post of country manager remains vacant. There was talk late last year or early this year that a decision would be made, but it is still unfilled.

Anthropic established its Korean unit, “Anthropic Korea LLC,” in July last year. Its address is on Teheran-ro in Seoul’s Gangnam district, where the Gangnam Finance Center is located, and it is believed to be using an overseas shared office as its registered address. Its capital is 500 million won, and the registered director is Scott Alexander Booth, who is with the U.S. headquarters.

Anthropic said it understands the company had aimed to appoint a country manager by the end of last year, and that it is continuing the selection process. It did not provide a separate answer on the specific process or timing.

With no country manager in place, Anthropic Korea appointed Lee Yeop (이엽), head of Asia-Pacific startup partnerships, as its first employee around September last year. The move focused on the startup and developer community. It then held events in succession including a Builder Summit, a Claude Code Builder Hackathon and a Claude Code Meetup Seoul. Anthropic is currently recruiting in Seoul across 5 job functions, including startup sales.

This month it launched a credit support program worth $10,000 (about 14 million won) for member companies of the Korea Startup Forum (KOSFO) to use the Claude API. A KOSFO official said Anthropic is making South Korea a key hub and strengthening cooperation with the startup and developer ecosystem.

Anthropic is also discussing cooperation with the South Korean government, increasing the need for a country manager role.

Bae Kyung-hoon (배경훈), deputy prime minister and science and ICT minister, met Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at the AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi, India, last month. The opening of an office in Seoul and ways to cooperate on policy were discussed at the venue.

A Ministry of Science and ICT official said Anthropic said during the meeting that it was recruiting a country manager, and the ministry asked it to share progress because there would be many areas to cooperate once the country manager is appointed. The official drew a line, saying specific areas and timing of cooperation have yet to be decided.

In Japan, Anthropic has completed the appointment of a representative and secured major corporate customers.

According to overseas media reports including Nikkei, Anthropic Japan appointed Hidetoshi Tojo, former head of Snowflake Japan, as its representative on Oct. 29 at the same time it established the entity. It then named Nomura Research Institute (NRI) as its first official reseller and quickly secured major corporate customers including Rakuten, Panasonic and Mizuho. In March this year it added resellers including Classmethod and NHN Techorus.

Rival OpenAI appointed former Google Korea chief Kim Kyung-hoon as general representative and officially launched 4 months after establishing OpenAI Korea, in September last year. Within 2 months of taking office, Kim signed an official reseller contract with Samsung SDS and also formalised Stargate AI infrastructure cooperation with Samsung and SK Group. Its domestic staff stands at about 10. An OpenAI official said the company views South Korea as a very important market in the global AI ecosystem, and that it is expanding adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise and its API while actively broadening touchpoints with the startup and developer ecosystem through coding agents such as Codex.