Anthropic opens its fifth APAC office in Singapore and signs an AI MOU with the government

Anthropic opened a new office in Singapore on October 14, its fifth in the Asia-Pacific region, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Singapore Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MODI). The MOU is the more interesting part of the announcement: it sets out cooperation in AI safety, security and model evaluation, research on AI adoption and its impact, and responsible adoption across the public and private sectors.

What the MOU actually covers

Kai Fong Chng, Permanent Secretary of MODI, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann signed it on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week, with Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo and Michael Sellitto, Anthropic's head of APAC policy, witnessing. Per Anthropic, the plan includes technical exchanges with Singapore's AI safety, security and assurance institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response. The company says it does similar work with safety institutes around the world, where sharing technical information gives governments a clearer view of frontier AI capabilities and risks.

The MOU also covers strengthening AI skills in Singapore, helping small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI responsibly, and supporting the government's goal of building AI capability among public officers. Anthropic says it will share research and data with the government, including from the Anthropic Economic Index, and offer technical and policy expertise as Singapore develops its rules for AI.

There is a track record behind it. Anthropic's work with Singapore goes back to 2023, when it joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the AI Verify Foundation, followed by a red-teaming project in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

Why Singapore, specifically

In the latest Economic Index, Singapore ranks second of 121 countries in Claude.ai usage relative to its population, at nearly six times what its size alone would predict, according to Anthropic. The customer list backs the number up:

• GovTech Singapore: more than 1,500 engineers and technical staff use Claude Code to modernize government systems. The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore is exploring Claude for cyber defense.
• DBS, Southeast Asia's largest bank, uses Claude across its Singapore operations for software development and day-to-day productivity. GIC, the sovereign wealth fund, is rolling Claude out across investment and corporate teams.
• Grab powers BriX, its sales assistant, with Claude, and the company says it saves Grab's sales teams roughly 40,000 hours per quarter. Sea, behind Shopee and Garena, uses Claude for its customer service chatbot, and thousands of its employees write and debug code with it.

One detail for regulated sectors deserves a note: financial services organizations can now run Claude with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock, which helps them meet strict data processing requirements.

What this means

Two practical points. If you are building in APAC and data residency is a constraint, in-region inference in Singapore on Bedrock is now a standard option rather than something negotiated case by case. And if you watch how governments contract with frontier labs, this MOU is a template: evaluation, testing standards, incident response, shared data, signed on the sidelines of a cyber security week and witnessed by the minister. The office is open and Anthropic is hiring there.