Samsung SDS becomes South Korea's first Anthropic certified partner

Samsung SDS said on September 15 that it has obtained Select Tier status in Anthropic's Claude Partner Network (CPN), making it the first company in South Korea to hold a certified Anthropic partner qualification.

According to The Chosun Daily, the qualification lets Samsung SDS support the entire chain around Anthropic's Claude models — supply, deployment, operations and technical support. It builds on a strategic partnership agreement the two companies signed at the San Francisco AI Summit in July.

Concretely, Samsung SDS can now advise customers on adopting Claude, supply the model through Amazon Bedrock, AWS's generative AI platform, build and operate the surrounding services, and provide technical support.

The company said it plans to combine Anthropic's AI capabilities with its own AI transformation experience across public sector, finance, manufacturing and logistics to expand Claude-based AI services and agent development.

People are the other half of the plan. Samsung SDS said it will systematically train specialists it calls "Applied AI Engineers" to strengthen its ability to support customers deploying, operating and applying Claude on site.

Both sides framed the certification as a step up. Chris Chaury, Anthropic's International GTM Head, said the CPN Select Tier status would deepen strategic collaboration and help Korean companies use Claude to raise productivity and innovate. Samsung SDS CEO Lee June-hee said the company will integrate global AI technologies, including Claude, with Samsung SDS's multidimensional AI full stack to support customers' AI transformation.

For Anthropic, working through a large local systems integrator is the standard route into Korean enterprises, especially in regulated sectors such as the public sector and finance. For Samsung SDS, the certification moves it from cloud and systems integration toward the last mile of enterprise Claude deployments, packaging model capability into deliverable industry solutions.

What to watch is whether the status converts into named industry customers and repeatable solutions, and how quickly Claude spreads through Korean public, financial and manufacturing workloads. How Anthropic's partner network divides labour with existing cloud and IT services ecosystems will shape how Korean enterprises buy AI.