Anthropic has opened an office in Singapore, its fifth in the Asia-Pacific region, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information. Permanent Secretary Kai Fong Chng and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann signed it on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week, witnessed by Minister Josephine Teo.
The MOU covers cooperation on model evaluation and testing standards, incident response, research into AI adoption and its economic effects, and skills programmes for public officers and smaller firms. Anthropic also says it will share data from its Economic Index, and that the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore is exploring how Claude could strengthen cyber defence. The company has sat in Singapore’s Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox, run by IMDA and the AI Verify Foundation, since 2023, and ran a red-teaming project in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.
Why it matters: Singapore is a small market that punches well above its weight in announcements like this, and Anthropic’s own figure is the reason. It says Singapore ranks second of 121 countries for Claude.ai use relative to population, at nearly six times what its size alone would predict. More than 1,500 GovTech Singapore engineers and technical staff have taken up Claude Code.