SINGAPORE Oct 24 - Artificial intelligence startup

Anthropic will open an office in South Korea, as it ramps up its

Asia expansion, a top executive said on Thursday.

"Out of the top five (Anthropic) users globally, three are

in Asia: Korea, Japan, and India," Chief Commercial Officer Paul

Smith told Reuters in an interview.

He said that 25% of the overall usage of its AI coding tool,

Claude Code, happens in Asia, with the most active user being in

South Korea. The company said the number of Claude Code active

weekly users in Korea had grown sixfold in the last four months.

The move comes on the heels of a large-scale global

expansion by Anthropic to triple its international workforce to

meet a rise in demand for its Claude AI large language models

outside the United States.

"That growth is going to accelerate in 2026," Smith said.

"We're focused on the enterprise business and we're now just

approaching $7 billion of revenue," referring to the company's

annualized revenue run rate.

The AI startup is racing rivals to build models that can

reliably operate software and complete multi-step work, key for

AI agents, which can perform tasks on behalf of humans.

Anthropic's AI model Claude now has more than 300,000

enterprise customers, with nearly 80% of usage coming from

outside the U.S.

Smith said the startup will open its Seoul office in early

2026, while already providing services to partners like SK

Telecom, which invested $100 million in the startup in 2023.

The Alphabet and Amazon.com ( AMZN )-backed AI firm,

valued at $183 billion, already announced plans to open offices

in Tokyo and the Indian tech hub of Bengaluru and is hiring for

over 100 roles in Dublin, London, and Zurich.

The executive told Reuters that Anthropic is searching for

local partners in all three Asian markets to support clients and

that a further expansion is expected to include an office in

Australia.