SK Telecom buys $100m of Anthropic’s AI technology

South Korean telecommunications company SK Telecom has invested USD $100 million in AI technology from the US-based tech firm Anthropic to build a large language model customised for telcos.

Under the agreement, SKT and Anthropic will jointly develop a multilingual large language model that supports languages, including Korean, English, Japanese and Spanish.

The companies said it will combine SK Telecom’s experience in telecommunications with Anthropic’s AI technology including its AI model Claude to customise. an industry model to best meet the needs of telcos.

Anthropic will also work with SK Telecom to fine-tune Anthropic’s Claude to telco use cases, including industry specific customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications. According to SK Telecom by customising the model to the telco industry, telcos will benefit from increased performance relative to the use of more general models.

Jared Kaplan, a Co-Founder and chief science officer of Anthropic has been appointed to oversee the overall direction of the industry customisation as well as the product roadmap.

“SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry. We’re excited to combine our AI expertise with SKT’s industry knowledge to build a large language model that is customized for telcos. We see industry specific large language models  as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology,” said Dario Amodei, co-Founder and CEO of Anthropic.

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT added, “By combining our Korean language-based large language model with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem together with our global telco partners.”