The Anthropic Singapore office opened on October 14, and the AI company also signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the city-state’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information. It is Anthropic’s fifth office in the Asia-Pacific region, the company announced, and its first focused on Southeast Asia.
An MOU is a formal statement of intent between two parties. It sets out what they plan to work on together but, unlike a contract, it is usually not legally binding.
What the agreement covers
The MOU was signed by Kai Fong Chng, the ministry’s Permanent Secretary, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann, on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week. Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo witnessed the signing. It outlines cooperation in three areas: AI safety, security and model evaluation; research into how AI is adopted and what it changes; and responsible use across the public and private sectors.
In practice, Anthropic says it will hold technical exchanges with Singapore’s AI safety and assurance bodies on evaluation methods, testing standards and incident response. It also plans to share research and data, including from its Economic Index, a regular study of how people use Claude. The company will help small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI, support efforts to build AI skills among public officers, and offer technical and policy expertise as Singapore develops its own rules.
“Singapore has been a leader in responsible AI, with a long track record of investment in model testing and evaluation,” Mann said. Chng said the partnership “reflects the Government’s commitment to scaling up the responsible adoption of AI.”
Why Singapore
The choice is backed by usage data. Singapore ranks second of 121 countries in Claude.ai usage relative to its population, according to Anthropic’s latest Economic Index, at nearly six times what its size alone would predict.
Local customers are already substantial. More than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at GovTech Singapore, the government’s technology agency, use Claude Code to modernise government systems, and the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore is exploring Claude for cyber defence. DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, uses Claude for software development and daily productivity, while the sovereign wealth fund GIC is rolling it out across its investment and corporate teams. Grab says its Claude-powered sales assistant saves its sales teams about 40,000 hours a quarter, and Sea, the company behind Shopee, uses Claude in customer service and coding.
For regulated industries, Claude can now run with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock. Inference is the process of a model answering requests, and running it inside the region helps banks and other regulated firms meet rules about where data is processed.
A long relationship with regulators
The relationship with Singapore’s regulators is older than the office. Anthropic joined the country’s Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox, run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the AI Verify Foundation, in 2023. It later worked with them on a red-teaming project, in which testers deliberately try to make a model misbehave, in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.
A competitive market
Anthropic is not the first big AI lab in Singapore. OpenAI opened an office there in 2024, and Singapore has become a regional base for many technology companies. Anthropic also has a financial link to the country: GIC was among the investors in its $13 billion Series F funding round in 2025. The company is now growing quickly ahead of a planned stock market listing, as we described in our report on Anthropic’s plans to sell shares.
What comes next
Dale Finlay, Anthropic’s General Manager for ASEAN, said the company is “committed to Singapore for the long term.” The office is hiring. On the day of the announcement, Anthropic hosted a Builder Summit for more than 300 developers, and earlier in the week local community ambassadors held a meetup for more than 700 builders.
Why it matters for businesses
For companies in Southeast Asia, a local Anthropic team means closer support, faster access to new features and, for regulated firms, in-region data processing. Singapore’s government is also likely to use the partnership to shape testing and safety standards that could influence rules in other Asian markets, so businesses deploying AI in the region should watch what comes out of it.
Our take
Singapore is a logical choice: high usage, demanding customers in finance and government, and regulators who take AI testing seriously. The MOU is a statement of intent rather than a binding commitment, so its value will depend on what the technical exchanges actually produce. If Anthropic and Singapore develop shared evaluation and incident-response standards, the agreement could matter well beyond one city. If not, it will be remembered mainly as a well-timed office opening.