Anthropic Opens Singapore Office and Signs AI Agreement With the Government

Anthropic opened a Singapore office on October 14, 2026 — its fifth in Asia-Pacific, following offices in South Korea, Japan, India, and Australia. The launch event took place at Capella Singapore during the company’s Builder Summit, a day after Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann signed a memorandum of understanding with Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information at Singapore International Cyber Week.

The signing was witnessed by Digital Development and Information Minister Josephine Teo and Anthropic’s Asia-Pacific policy head Michael Sellitto. The office itself sits in Raffles Place, Singapore’s business district.

What the agreement covers

The memorandum identifies three areas of cooperation: AI safety, security, and model evaluation; research into AI adoption and its effects; and responsible use across government and business. Technical exchanges will cover evaluation methods, testing standards, and responses to incidents.

Mann used the launch to make the case for independent evaluation. “When we train a new model, nobody really knows exactly what its capabilities are,” he said. “Working with AI safety institutes like the new one in Singapore, as well as those around the world, is very important to understanding the risks and benefits of these new models as they’re being developed.”

The memorandum sets out areas of cooperation rather than a detailed operating schedule. No dates were announced for the technical exchanges, research releases, or a completed incident response process. Those practical arrangements will determine how the partnership works beyond the signing ceremony.

Chng Kai Fong, the ministry’s permanent secretary, described public confidence as a condition for wider adoption: “Singapore’s approach to AI has always been to enable innovation while keeping pace with its evolving risks. Trust is critical for businesses, workers, and the public to use AI with confidence.”

Anthropic also plans to provide technical and policy expertise as Singapore develops its AI rules, help small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI, and support the government’s effort to build AI capability among public officers. Sellitto said Singapore does not receive priority access to unreleased Anthropic models; organizations there can apply to the company’s cyber-verification programme to access the latest launched models for internal security testing.

Singapore wants faster answers when things break

Incident response is one of the most concrete parts of the deal. Senior Minister K Shanmugam, who coordinates national security, called on October 13 for technology companies to share information more quickly as AI risks grow: “The key ask from Singapore, as well as many of the other countries, was: when some things happen, can we have full transparency immediately?”

Sellitto said Anthropic was committed to sharing information about cyberincidents as quickly as it responsibly could. His remarks also responded to Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s call for a global independent body to govern AI.

A relationship three years in the making

The office did not come out of nowhere. Anthropic’s relationship with Singapore began in 2023, when it joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the AI Verify Foundation. The two sides later ran a red-teaming project across English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil.

Singapore has been building a broader program of AI partnerships alongside it: an agreement with OpenAI on applied AI innovation in May 2026, a memorandum with Microsoft on AI safety and security in June 2026, and work between GovTech and Google DeepMind on detecting scams directly on devices as they happen.

Claude is already deep in Singapore

The commercial case for the office is visible in the numbers. According to Anthropic, more than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency use Claude Code to modernize government systems and accelerate software delivery. Singapore ranks second among 121 countries in Anthropic’s Economic Index for Claude.ai use relative to population, at 5.81 times the expected level.

The customer list spans regulated sectors: DBS uses Claude for software development and everyday productivity inside its security framework; sovereign wealth fund GIC is rolling it out across investment and corporate services teams. GIC is also a financial backer — it first invested in September 2025 in a $13 billion round and led a $30 billion Series G in February 2026.

Grab uses Claude to power BriX, its sales assistant, which the company says saves sales teams roughly 40,000 hours each quarter and surfaces new sales opportunities. Sea, the company behind Shopee, uses it for faster customer-service responses and coding help; Supabase, the developer platform with Singapore roots, is another Claude Code user. Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency is separately exploring Claude for cyber defense, at an exploratory stage.

The local team is still being built. Anthropic listed 12 Singapore vacancies as of October 14, spanning sales, marketing, recruitment, and finance, and did not disclose its current headcount or target size. More than 300 developers attended Builder Summit Singapore, and more than 700 attended a community meetup earlier in the week.

Dale Finlay, the company’s general manager for ASEAN, said the focus is bringing products to customers: “We’re committed to Singapore for the long term. Our customers here hold AI to an extremely high standard, especially when it comes to reliability and security. Having a team on the ground means we can get even closer to the organizations putting Claude to work on their hardest problems.”

On the question the agreement’s research arm will study most closely — jobs — Mann was blunt that large-scale displacement was inevitable, though Anthropic had not yet seen it happening.