Anthropic opens Singapore office and agrees AI safety cooperation

Anthropic opened its fifth Asia-Pacific office in Singapore on Wednesday and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information. Permanent Secretary Chng Kai Fong and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann signed it on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week, witnessed by Minister Josephine Teo. The agreement covers cooperation on AI safety, model evaluation, testing standards and incident response, as well as helping small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI and building AI capability among public officers.

According to Anthropic's Economic Index, Singapore ranks second of 121 countries for Claude.ai usage relative to population. More than 1,500 engineers at the GovTech agency use Claude Code, and customers also include bank DBS, sovereign fund GIC and ride-hailing firm Grab. According to Fortune, Mann defended Anthropic's continued oversight of how its most powerful models are used, citing their dual-use nature: "It's a technical fact that when you release open-weight models, there are no safeguards that are actually resilient to being open-weight."

Google DeepMind also presented a project with Singapore's government at Cyber Week: a small Gemma model trained on local scam patterns that is meant to detect suspicious messages directly on smartphones. According to the partners, scams account for more than half of the crimes reported in Singapore, with losses exceeding four billion Singapore dollars since 2019.