In addition to the investment, South Korea’s telecom operator has entered into a partnership agreement with AI provider Anthropic to build a large language model (LLM) customized for telcos

South Korean telecom operator SK Telekom (SKT) on Sunday announced it was investing an additional $100 million in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company, co-founded by former OpenAI executives.

The investment is the second injection of STK funds into the promising startup. Earlier, SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC), the Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of SKT, invested an undisclosed sum in the project. Overall, Anthropic has raised a total of $1.5B in funding over 5 rounds.

This August, Anthropic released a new version of its accelerated and cheaper text generation large language model (LLM), available via API Claude Instant. Along with the additional investment, SKT has entered into a partnership agreement with Anthropic to build a dedicated LLM customized specifically for telcos. That should increase AI efficiency for telecom providers compared to the use of more general models.

The LLM will be multilingual, supporting Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish languages. The two companies will also fine-tune Anthropic’s generative AI model Claude to telco use cases, including industry-specific customer service, marketing, sales, and interactive consumer applications.

The multilingual telco-focused LLM is expected to be integrated into the Telco AI Platform currently being built by the Global Telco AI Alliance. The new aggregate platform will enable the members of the Global Telco AI Alliance – including Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel – to develop and offer AI services or mobile apps customized to their respective markets and customers quickly and efficiently.

“We see industry specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology,” says Dario Amodei, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Anthropic.

“By combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem together with our global telco partners,” adds SKT Chief Executive Officer Ryu Young-sang.