On October 14 Anthropic opened an office in Singapore — its fifth in Asia-Pacific — and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information on the same day.
Who signed
Kai Fong Chng, Permanent Secretary at the ministry, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann signed on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week. Minister Josephine Teo and Michael Sellitto, Anthropic’s head of APAC policy, witnessed it. Dale Finlay runs the new office as General Manager for ASEAN, and his quote is refreshingly unglossy: customers there hold AI to an extremely high standard, especially on reliability and security.
What the MOU covers
Three areas: AI safety, security and model evaluation; research on AI adoption and its impact; and responsible adoption across the public and private sectors. In practice that means technical exchanges with Singapore’s safety and assurance institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response. Anthropic also plans to share research and data, including from the Economic Index, and to offer technical and policy input as Singapore writes its AI rules. None of this starts from zero: Anthropic joined the IMDA and AI Verify Foundation’s Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox back in 2023, and a red-teaming project in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil followed.
Where Claude already runs in the country
At GovTech Singapore, more than 1,500 engineers and technical staff use Claude Code to modernise government systems. The Cyber Security Agency is exploring how Claude could strengthen national cyber defence. DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, uses Claude in software development and day-to-day work; GIC, the sovereign wealth fund, is rolling it out across investment and corporate services. Regulated industries can now run Claude with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock. Grab powers its sales assistant BriX with Claude.
Two labs, one country, the same week
On the same day, Google DeepMind announced a collaboration with that same Singaporean government on a fine-tuned, on-device model for scam detection. That’s the real story behind the press release: Singapore is negotiating with both labs in parallel, and its currency isn’t money, it’s testing and evaluation expertise. Whoever helps write the testing standards gets to shape what counts as safe later. For a country of six million people, that’s a remarkably strong hand.