Anthropic raises $100M from SK Telecom to build AI for telecommunications

AI

Google LLC-backed artificial intelligence research startup Anthropic announced Sunday that it has raised an additional $100 million from South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom Co. Ltd. with the aim to build large language model AI systems customized for the telecom industry.

According to a press release from SKT, the investment is part of a new strategic partnership and follows the massive funding round for Anthropic that netted the company $450 million in May that SKT’s venture capital arm also participated in. Anthropic has raised over $1.5 billion in funds since it began fundraising in 2021, according to Crunchbase.

In partnership with Anthropic, SKT said the two companies will jointly develop LLM AI models specialized for telecommunications purposes that will free telecom companies from needing to design, customize and train their own. Under the agreement, the two companies will create a multilingual LLM that supports multiple languages, including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Spanish.

Anthropic is best known for its chatbot Claude, a powerful generative AI model and rival to OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. The company recently released multiple upgrades to Claude, providing it with numerous capabilities including larger context windows and the ability to read a novel in under a minute.

“With our strategic investment in Anthropic, a global leading AI technology company, we will be working closely with Anthropic to promote AI innovation,” said SK Telecom Chief Executive Ryu Young-sang. “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.”

SKT said that it will work with Anthropic to fine-tune Claude for telco use cases, particularly customer service, marketing, sales and interactive consumer applications where employees need an assistant to offload tedious research. In these cases, an AI can quickly understand business contexts and knowledge work and provide rapid, up-to-date information or rapidly write replies for customer or consumer questions, or help a worker be more productive.

The strategic partnership follows SK Telecom announcement of the formation of the Global Telco AI Alliance alongside Deutsche Telekom AG, Emirates Telecommunications Group Co. and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. The new alliance intends to co-invest in the development of a Telco AI Platform that Anthropic’s multilingual LLM will enhance.

“SKT has incredible ambitions to use AI to transform the telco industry,” said Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei. “We see industry specific LLMs as having high potential to create safer and more reliable deployments of AI technology.”

By delivering a model tailored and fine-tuned for the telco industry, SKT and Anthropic believe that it will offload the burden on telcos to develop and train their own LLMs, which requires a great deal of time and dedicated resources. As a result, the member companies of the Global Telco AI Alliance will benefit greatly from this partnership. Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer of Anthropic, was tapped to supervise the new telco LLM development project and its future development going forward.

Customer communications are a common use case for generative AI models, in May, the videoconferencing and chat platform Zoom Communications Inc. partnered with Anthropic to use the Claude chatbot in its product suite. Zoom now uses Claude with its own products, starting with Zoom Contact Center, which is unified communications and contact center service offering that supports agents, supervisors and administrators hosted in the cloud. Using the chatbot, customers can receive self-service resolutions and employees can make quick replies to customer questions based on business data.

Image: Anthropic