Anthropic Opens Its Fifth Asia-Pacific Office in Singapore and Signs an AI Safety MOU With the Government

Anthropic announced on Tuesday that it has opened an office in Singapore, its fifth in the Asia-Pacific region alongside Tokyo, Bengaluru, Seoul and Sydney, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the city-state's Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI). The signing took place on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week, with co-founder Ben Mann signing for Anthropic and MDDI Permanent Secretary Kai Fong Chng signing for the government, witnessed by Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo and Michael Sellitto, Anthropic's head of APAC policy.

The MOU is a statement of intent rather than a binding treaty, but it is unusually specific about what both sides plan to do. It covers cooperation on AI safety, security and model evaluation; research into AI adoption and its impact; and responsible adoption across the public and private sectors. Concretely, Anthropic plans technical exchanges with Singapore's AI safety, security and assurance institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response, and says it will share research and data with the government, including findings from its Anthropic Economic Index, as Singapore writes its own AI rules. The agreement also commits the company to help strengthen AI skills locally, support small and medium-sized businesses in adopting AI responsibly, and build AI capability among public officers.

The partnership has a longer history than the announcement suggests. Anthropic's work with Singapore dates back to 2023, when it joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the AI Verify Foundation, and later took part in a red-teaming project conducted in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

The commercial logic is easy to see in Anthropic's own usage data. In its latest Economic Index, Singapore ranks second among 121 countries in Claude.ai usage relative to population, at nearly six times the level the island's size alone would predict. In the public sector, more than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at GovTech Singapore have adopted Claude Code to modernize government systems and speed up software delivery, while the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore is exploring how Claude could strengthen the country's cyber defense.

The private-sector list is equally dense. Grab powers its BriX sales assistant with Claude, which the company says saves its sales teams roughly 40,000 hours every quarter and surfaces new sales opportunities. DBS, Southeast Asia's largest bank, uses Claude across software development and day-to-day productivity within its security and governance framework, and sovereign wealth fund GIC is rolling Claude out across its investment and corporate services teams. Regulated firms can run Claude with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock to satisfy data-processing requirements. Sea, the company behind Shopee, Garena and Monee, uses Claude to improve its Shopee customer-service chatbot, and thousands of its employees write and debug code with it. Developer platform Supabase builds with Claude Code.

Dale Finlay, general manager of ASEAN at Anthropic, said the company is committed to Singapore for the long term, noting that customers there hold AI to an extremely high standard on reliability and security. The new office is hiring: Anthropic's careers site lists around a dozen Singapore-based openings spanning finance, marketing, people, public benefit and sales. The move also lands in a market where rivals are already investing heavily. In May, OpenAI announced more than SG$300 million to establish its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States in Singapore, in partnership with MDDI.

The broader pattern is that frontier labs are no longer competing only on model benchmarks but on institutional footprints: safety-institute relationships, government MOUs and enterprise deployments that are hard to dislodge. An MOU does not obligate Singapore to anything, but it formalizes a channel through which a national government gets pre-deployment visibility into a frontier lab's models. For Anthropic, whose IPO is reportedly imminent, an APAC beachhead anchored by one of the world's most AI-eager governments is a useful line in the growth story.