By Roman Aglaganov
Singapore has spent years positioning itself as a place where governments and AI companies can test models together. On 14 October, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, opened an office there, its fifth in Asia-Pacific, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information.
What the agreement covers
The MOU was signed at Singapore International Cyber Week by Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann and Chng Kai Fong, the ministry’s Permanent Secretary, with Minister Josephine Teo present. It sets out cooperation in three areas:
Safety and evaluation: technical exchanges with Singapore’s AI safety, security and assurance institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response.
Research: studies of how AI is being adopted and what it changes, including data from the Anthropic Economic Index.
Adoption: help for small businesses and for public officers learning to use AI, and policy input as Singapore develops its AI rules.
Why Singapore
Singapore ranks second of 121 countries for Claude.ai use relative to its population, at nearly six times what its size would predict, according to Anthropic’s Economic Index. More than 1,500 engineers at GovTech Singapore, the government’s technology agency, use Claude Code. The relationship goes back to 2023, when Anthropic joined a sandbox for evaluating generative AI, followed by red-teaming in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.
Why it matters
Agreements like this are voluntary and short on enforcement, but they give governments an early view of what frontier models can do. With US policy on AI oversight in flux and the EU now enforcing its law, smaller countries like Singapore are building their own channels to the labs. (Disclosure: AI Pulse is written with the help of AI tools, including Claude.)
