Anthropic opened a new office in Singapore, its fifth in the Asia-Pacific region, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the country's Ministry of Digital Development and Information, according to an official company statement.

According to Anthropic, the agreement 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 Josephine Teo and Michael Sellitto, Anthropic's head of APAC policy, witnessed the signing.

"We founded Anthropic on the belief that capability and safety have to go hand in hand. With this MOU, we'll partner with Singapore to help ensure the transition to powerful AI goes well here, across Asia-Pacific, and around the world," Ben Mann said, according to the company.

The memorandum covers three areas, Anthropic says: technical cooperation on AI model safety, security and evaluation; research on AI adoption and its effects; and responsible-adoption projects across the public and private sectors. The company says it will hold technical exchanges with Singapore's safety, security and evaluation institutions.

Where Claude already runs in Singapore

Anthropic says more than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at GovTech Singapore, the government's technology agency, already use the Claude Code programming assistant to modernize and maintain public systems, work the company says speeds up the delivery of digital services at national scale. Singapore's Cyber Security Agency is separately exploring how Claude could strengthen the country's cyber defenses, according to the statement.

In the private sector, the company cites DBS, which it describes as Southeast Asia's largest bank, using Claude for software development and internal productivity inside the bank's own security and governance framework. Sovereign wealth fund GIC is rolling out the assistant across its investment and corporate-services teams, Anthropic says.

The company also says ride-hailing firm Grab uses Claude to power BriX, an internal sales assistant that, according to Anthropic, saves sales teams roughly 40,000 hours per quarter and surfaces new sales opportunities. Sea, the company behind Shopee, Garena and Monee, uses the model for Shopee's customer-service chatbot and for coding tasks, the statement says.

A market Anthropic says over-indexes on Claude

By Anthropic's own Economic Index, cited in the announcement, Singapore ranks second out of 121 countries in Claude.ai usage relative to population, nearly six times what its size alone would predict. The company says its relationship with Singapore's government dates back to 2023, when it joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox, a program run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the AI Verify Foundation, and later ran a red-teaming project in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

Anthropic also says customers in regulated sectors, such as financial services, can now run Claude with in-region inference through Amazon Bedrock, which the company says helps them meet local data-processing requirements. "Our customers here hold AI to an extremely high standard, especially when it comes to reliability and security. Having a team on the ground means we can get even closer to the organizations putting Claude to work on their hardest problems," said Dale Finlay, Anthropic's general manager for ASEAN, according to the statement.

In practice

  • Who can use it and where: companies and government agencies in Singapore already run Claude through the examples Anthropic cites, GovTech, DBS, GIC, Grab and Sea; regulated-sector customers, such as financial services, can run the model with in-region inference via Amazon Bedrock.
  • Since when: Anthropic says the new office opened this week; the company's relationship with Singapore's government dates back to 2023, when it joined the country's generative AI evaluation sandbox.
  • What changes: Singapore now has a local Anthropic team, which the company says will work closely with customers like GovTech, DBS and Grab and run technical exchanges with the country's safety institutions.
  • Who is affected: government staff, banks, tech companies and users of services that already run on Claude in Singapore, according to the company.