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Anthropic opens an office in Singapore and signs an AI safety memorandum with the government
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Anthropic is launching a base in Singapore, the company's fifth in Asia-Pacific, and has sealed a deal with the ministry in charge of the country's digital development. The pact spans the safety and testing of models, plus the study of how AI gets adopted. Singapore ranks as the second country for Claude.ai use per resident, and GovTech already has more than 1,500 technical staff on Claude Code.
Anthropic, the company that develops the Claude assistant, today opened an office in Singapore, its fifth in Asia-Pacific, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the country's Ministry of Digital Development and Information.
The document was signed by Kai Fong Chng, the ministry's Permanent Secretary, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann during Singapore International Cyber Week, with Minister Josephine Teo as a witness. The memorandum sets out cooperation on AI safety and model evaluation, on research into how AI is being adopted and what it changes, and on responsible use in both the public and private sectors.
Anthropic expects to hold technical exchanges with Singapore's AI safety institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response, and to lend technical and policy know-how while the country drafts its AI rules. It also says it will share research and data with the government, including figures from its Economic Index, and will look for ways to build AI skills in the country and to help small businesses take up the technology.
The relationship is not new: in 2023 Anthropic joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox, an initiative of the AI Verify Foundation and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), and later worked with both on a red-teaming project (attack testing of the models) covering English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.
Singapore is one of its most active markets. According to Anthropic's Economic Index, the country is second among 121 for Claude.ai (its website) use per head of population, almost six times the level its size would suggest. GovTech Singapore, the government's technology agency, has more than 1,500 of its engineers and technical staff using Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, and the country's Cyber Security Agency is looking at how Claude might support its cyber defence. In the private sector, Anthropic names the bank DBS, the sovereign wealth fund GIC, Grab, whose BriX sales assistant saves its sales teams roughly 40,000 hours a quarter, and Sea, the group behind Shopee. Organisations in regulated sectors such as finance can already run Claude on Amazon Bedrock with in-region inference.
"We're committed to Singapore for the long term," said Dale Finlay, Anthropic's General Manager for ASEAN. The office is already open and hiring.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Opening an office is the least of it; what matters is the seat Anthropic secures while Singapore sets its rules. With the memorandum, the company moves from public-sector supplier to technical counterpart on model evaluation and incident response, the same role it says it plays with safety institutes in other countries. For the government it is a way to see up close what an advanced model can do and what risks it brings, without relying only on what the company publishes. What comes out of it is still unknown: a memorandum sets out intentions, not obligations, and the announcement gives no timelines or budget. For businesses in the region, the practical signal is the local presence and in-region inference, which makes it easier to use Claude in sectors with strict rules on where data is processed.
Official source: Anthropic · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
