On August 15, 2023, SK Telecom (SKT), South Korea’s largest mobile operator, announced a commercial partnership and strategic investment in Anthropic. As part of the agreement, SKT committed an additional $100 million to Anthropic, supplementing an earlier investment made by SK Telecom Venture Capital (SKTVC) in Silicon Valley.
Purpose of the collaboration
SKT and Anthropic will jointly develop a large language model (LLM) tailored to the needs of telecommunications companies. Anthropic will fine-tune its Claude model to create an industry-specific variant optimized for telco use cases, leveraging SKT’s domain expertise in telecommunications.
Targeted use cases
The fine-tuned model is intended to improve performance across several telco applications, including:
- customer service,
- marketing,
- sales,
- interactive consumer applications.
The model will be multilingual, supporting languages such as Korean, English, Japanese and Spanish, among others.
How the fine-tuning will work
Fine-tuning involves adapting Anthropic’s Claude to perform better on telecom-specific tasks. The process benefits from industry expert input: SKT specialists will provide feedback on Claude’s responses, and Anthropic will use that feedback to further train the model on industry-specific solutions. The companies say this approach allows Claude to scale SKT’s industry-leading expertise.
Company statements
Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT, said the strategic investment and close cooperation with Anthropic will promote AI innovation. He stated that combining SKT’s Korean-language LLM experience with Anthropic’s AI capabilities is expected to create synergy and help secure leadership in the AI ecosystem together with global telco partners.
Why this matters
The partnership highlights growing collaboration between telecommunications operators and leading AI companies in the sector’s digital transformation. Deploying telco-focused, multilingual LLMs could deliver practical advantages in customer support and market competitiveness for operators worldwide.
