Anthropic Opens Singapore Office, Signs MOU With Government

Anthropic opened an office in Singapore on October 14 and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Singapore's Ministry of Digital Development and Information. It is the company's fifth base in Asia-Pacific, after Tokyo, Bengaluru, Seoul and Sydney. Anthropic named Singapore one of its most active markets anywhere in the world and said Claude already powers services from organizations such as the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech), Grab and DBS that millions of people use every day.

The MOU was signed on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week. Chng Kai Fong, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Digital Development and Information, signed for the government and co-founder Ben Mann signed for the company, with Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo and Michael Sellitto, Anthropic's Head of APAC Policy, as witnesses. Cooperation runs along three lines: AI safety, security and model evaluation; research on AI adoption and its impact; and responsible adoption across the public and private sectors.

"Singapore has been a leader in responsible AI, with a long track record of investment in model testing and evaluation," Mann said, adding that "Anthropic was founded on the belief that capability and safety have to go hand in hand." Chng said "trust is critical for businesses, workers, and the public to use AI with confidence," and that the partnership reflects the government's commitment to building capabilities in its agencies and companies.

The relationship dates back to 2023, when Anthropic joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the AI Verify Foundation, later partnering on a red-teaming project in four languages: English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. Under the MOU, Anthropic will hold technical exchanges with Singapore's AI safety, security and assurance institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response. It also plans to help small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI responsibly, support AI capability building among public officers, share research and data with the government, including from the Anthropic Economic Index, and offer technical and policy expertise as Singapore develops its rules for AI.

Usage is the basis for the office. In the Anthropic Economic Index, Singapore ranks second of 121 countries in Claude usage relative to population, at nearly six times what its size alone would predict. According to September reporting, the multiple is 5.81 and Australia ranks first.

In the public sector, more than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at GovTech have adopted Claude Code to modernize government systems. The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore is exploring how Claude could strengthen national cyber defense. In finance, DBS, Southeast Asia's largest bank, uses Claude for software development and day-to-day work, and sovereign wealth fund GIC is rolling out Claude across its investment and corporate services teams. Anthropic said organizations in regulated sectors such as finance can run Claude with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock to meet data processing requirements.

Private technology companies offered concrete numbers. Grab runs its BriX sales assistant on Claude, saving its sales teams about 40,000 hours every quarter. Sea, the company behind Shopee, Garena and Monee, used Claude to make Shopee's customer service chatbot faster and more accurate, and thousands of its employees write and debug code with Claude. This week Anthropic hosted Builder Summit Singapore with more than 300 developers, and earlier local Claude community ambassadors held a meetup for more than 700 builders.

The ASEAN business is led by Dale Finlay, General Manager of ASEAN. According to reports, he spent nearly a decade at Google Cloud covering AI and financial services customers and was OpenAI's regional go-to-market head for six months before joining Anthropic. "Our customers here hold AI to an extremely high standard, especially when it comes to reliability and security," Finlay said, adding that having a team on the ground means getting closer to the organizations putting Claude to work on their hardest problems. Competition is clear. OpenAI opened its Asia headquarters in Singapore in late 2024, and the Singapore government has committed more than 1 billion Singapore dollars to public AI capabilities.

METAL has reported that during the same Cyber Week Google DeepMind unveiled a scam detection model with GovTech Singapore, and has also covered Anthropic's Cyber Mission. The Anthropic announcement METAL reviewed lists AI safety, security and model evaluation as the first area of cooperation under the MOU and includes incident response among the technical exchange topics. Through a sociological lens, that order is the core of the story. The relationship between a small city-state and a frontier AI company is moving beyond a purchase contract toward a shared oversight framework in which the government tests models and handles incidents together with the developer. Whether this structure, in which the government of the second-heaviest user nation is both customer and evaluator, becomes a negotiating model for other mid-sized countries is the next point to watch.