Anthropic, the company behind the frontier AI model Claude, will hold technical exchanges with Singapore’s AI safety, security and assurance institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response, under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information, the company announces. It’s also opening an office in Singapore, its fifth in Asia-Pacific.
Kai Fong Chng, the ministry’s permanent secretary, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann signed the MOU on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week.
Anthropic says it does similar work with safety institutes around the world, and that sharing technical information gives governments a clearer view of what frontier AI can do and where the risks are.
The MOU also covers adoption. Anthropic says it will look for ways to help small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI, support the government’s push to build AI skills among public officers, and share research and data, including from its Economic Index.
Singapore will also get technical and policy expertise from Anthropic as it develops its rules for AI. So the lab trading notes with Singapore’s AI testers will be advising the government that writes the rules.
Singapore’s government already uses Claude. More than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore) use Claude Code to modernize government systems, and the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore is exploring how Claude could help with the country’s cyber defense.
Banks and other firms in regulated sectors can run Claude with in-region inference on Amazon Bedrock, which helps them meet strict data processing rules. Amazon Web Services (AWS) says that covers Claude Sonnet 5 in its Singapore region, and that the processing doesn’t leave the region.
Grab – the super app and tech company – runs BriX, its sales assistant, on Claude. Anthropic says it saves Grab’s sales teams about 40,000 hours a quarter. DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, uses Claude for software development and day-to-day work in its Singapore operations. Sea, Shopee’s parent company, uses it to help Shopee’s customer service chatbot respond faster and more accurately.
Singapore ranks second of 121 countries in Claude.ai usage relative to its population, at nearly six times what its size would predict, according to Anthropic’s latest Economic Index. This MOU will likely cause adoption to increase even further as more people integrate Claude into their daily workflows.
