Enterprise

Samsung deploys ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to its entire Korean workforce, three years after banning the consumer version

OpenAI calls the rollout — covering an estimated 125,000 South Korean employees plus Samsung's worldwide Device eXperience division — one of its largest enterprise launches to date.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-06-23 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / ThisisEngineering — Software engineer working at a desk with multiple monitors showing code

Samsung Electronics turned on ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex for roughly 125,000 South Korean employees and the entirety of its global Device eXperience division on June 21, 2026, a deployment OpenAI describes as one of its largest enterprise rollouts to date. The DX unit builds Galaxy smartphones, home appliances, and the rest of Samsung’s consumer electronics catalog, which means the seats now extend across software, marketing, product, and manufacturing functions.

The interesting part isn’t the seat count. It’s that Samsung is the same company that banned generative AI tools outright in March 2023, after engineers pasted proprietary source code and confidential meeting notes into the public ChatGPT. That episode became a stock case study in enterprise data-leak risk. Three years later, Samsung is the marquee customer for the productized answer to that exact failure mode.

The path back was paved in pieces. On October 31, 2025, Samsung Chairman Lee Jae-yong and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signed a letter of intent spanning semiconductors, data centers, and cloud capacity under OpenAI’s Stargate program. Six weeks later, on December 23, 2025, Samsung SDS became the first Korean firm authorized to resell and support ChatGPT Enterprise locally. The workforce deployment is the third beat in a sequence that was clearly designed as one.

It also makes Samsung structurally unusual: both a 125,000-seat customer and a supplier of the advanced memory semiconductors OpenAI needs to build the infrastructure those seats run on. The vendor relationship runs in both directions.

Codex is the quieter half of the announcement and probably the more telling one. OpenAI says more than five million people now use it weekly, and that Korean weekly active users have grown nearly 800% since February 1, 2026. The pitch is that non-developers, not just engineers, are now building internal tools with it.

Harrison Kim, General Manager of OpenAI Korea, framed the deployment “not as a tool limited to certain teams or functions, but as a core platform for improving how employees around the world work and innovate.” Three years ago that sentence would’ve described the threat Samsung was defending against. Now it describes the procurement.

Sources