Anthropic opens its fifth APAC office: Singapore ranks 2nd of 121 countries for Claude

Anthropic is opening an office in Singapore, its fifth in the Asia-Pacific region, and signing a memorandum of understanding with the country's Ministry of Digital Development and Information. The company has a concrete reason: according to the latest Economic Index, Singapore ranks second of 121 countries in Claude.ai usage per capita. That is almost six times what the country's size alone would predict, which makes Singapore one of the most active Claude markets in the world.

What the memorandum says

Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann and Permanent Secretary Chng Kai Fong signed the document. The ceremony took place on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week. Minister Josephine Teo and Anthropic's head of APAC policy, Michael Sellitto, attended as witnesses.

The memorandum sets out three areas of cooperation: safety, security and model evaluation; research on AI adoption and its impact; and responsible use in government and business. The published portion contains no legal commitments on money or deliveries. It is a framework for exchanging expertise.

The cooperation did not start today. In 2023, Anthropic joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox run by IMDA and the AI Verify Foundation. The company and its Singaporean partners later ran joint red teaming in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. For a region with several working languages, that kind of testing matters more than English-language benchmarks.

Next come technical exchanges with Singapore's safety and assurance institutes: evaluation methods, testing standards and incident response. Anthropic does the same with comparable institutes in other countries. Governments get a clearer picture of the capabilities and risks of frontier models, and developers get feedback they can use to train safer systems. The company also promises to share data and research, including the Economic Index, and to advise authorities as Singapore writes its AI rules.

Who already works with Claude

The announcement rests on a customer list, and it is a long one:

• Usage: 2nd of 121 countries for Claude.ai per capita, roughly 6 times above the "expected" level.
• GovTech Singapore: more than 1500 engineers and technical specialists have moved to Claude Code to modernize government systems and speed up software delivery.
• Cyber Security Agency: is exploring how Claude could strengthen the country's cyber defense.
• DBS: Southeast Asia's largest bank uses Claude in development and everyday productivity, under a strict security and governance model.
• GIC: the sovereign wealth fund is deploying Claude across its investment and corporate teams.
• Grab: the Claude-based BriX assistant saves sales teams about 40 000 hours per quarter and surfaces new deal opportunities.
• Infrastructure: Claude is available with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock.

The last item is arguably the most practical. Banks and other regulated companies often get stuck not on model quality but on requirements for where data is processed. Regional inference removes at least some of those obstacles.

What companies in the region should do

If you build products or deploy AI in Southeast Asia, there are three signals here.

First, Anthropic is getting a local team. For enterprise customers, that means faster approvals, nearby support and the chance to discuss deployment architecture without a time-zone gap. ASEAN lead Dale Finlay says outright that customers in the region set high standards for reliability and security.

Second, regulated industries should look at in-region inference on Bedrock. It may cover part of the data residency requirements, but you still need to check compliance details with your own regulator.

Third, Anthropic promises small and medium-sized businesses help with responsible adoption, while the government continues to build AI skills among civil servants. Watch for training programs and new Economic Index publications: they will show which tasks people in Singapore hand to models most often. That is a good guide to where to start pilots.

It remains an open question what the exchange of data and methods will amount to in practice. For now, this is a proposal for cooperation, not a finished standard. But the combination of government customers, banks, a sovereign wealth fund and tech companies makes Singapore a rare testbed where AI's impact on the economy can be measured with live numbers.