AI startup Anthropic secures $100m from SK Telecom

South Korean telecoms giant SK Telecom invested $100m in the AI startup Anthropic.

The two companies have signed a partnership to develop a large language model for the Telco AI platform.

The forthcoming development will be available in Korean, English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Spanish. It will enable the creation of tailored AI services for global telecommunications product providers.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei said that SK Telecom has “incredible ambitions” to use AI to “transform” the telecommunications industry.

“We believe that industry-wide language models have great potential for creating safer and more reliable AI technologies,” he added.

In addition, the companies plan to jointly refine Anthropic’s latest model Claude 2, which was released in July.

The Anthropic project was founded by former employees of the leading AI development firm OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, which is backed by Microsoft.

In May 2023, the startup raised $450m in a Series C financing round. Among the investors were Google, Spark Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Zoom Ventures and others.

According to Crunchbase, in two years of existence Anthropic has raised $1.6 billion, making it the second AI company by total funding raised. In first place is OpenAI with $11.3 billion.

Earlier reports said that Google invested $300 million in Anthropic.

In March the company unveiled Claude chatbot, which is designed to rival ChatGPT.

In May the startup presented the ‘constitutions’ for the responsible creation of AI algorithms.