Claude gets a desk in Singapore

Anthropic said on October 14 that it has opened an office in Singapore, its fifth in Asia-Pacific, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information.

The memorandum, signed on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week, lists cooperation on AI safety, security, and model evaluation; research on adoption and its effects; and responsible use in public and private organizations. Anthropic says it plans technical exchanges on evaluation, testing standards, and incident response, and that it will share research, including from its Economic Index, as Singapore writes rules.

The usage figure Anthropic cites from that index: Singapore ranks second of 121 countries in Claude.ai use relative to population, at nearly six times what its population alone would predict.

The deployment claims, also Anthropic’s, are concrete enough to repeat with that label. More than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at the Government Technology Agency have adopted Claude Code for government systems. The Cyber Security Agency is exploring Claude for cyber defense. DBS, which Anthropic calls Southeast Asia’s largest bank, uses Claude in its Singapore operations, including software development, inside the bank’s own security framework. GIC is rolling Claude out across investment and corporate teams. Anthropic says regulated firms can run Claude with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock.

At Grab, Anthropic says the sales assistant BriX, powered by Claude, saves sales teams about 40,000 hours a quarter. Sea uses Claude on a Shopee customer-service chatbot and for employees writing code.

The relationship is not new. Anthropic says it joined Singapore’s Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox in 2023, and later worked on a red-team project in English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil.

This week the company hosted a builder summit of more than 300 developers, and says community ambassadors held a meetup of more than 700. The office is open and hiring.