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Anthropic opens a Singapore office and signs an AI safety MOU with the government
On 14 October 2026 Anthropic opened an office in Singapore, its fifth in Asia-Pacific, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information covering AI safety, model evaluation and responsible adoption. The MOU sets out areas of cooperation, not binding rules.
Anthropic opened an office in Singapore on 14 October 2026, its fifth in the Asia-Pacific region after South Korea, Japan, India and Australia. On the same day it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Singapore's Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) on AI safety, model evaluation and responsible adoption.
The agreement
The MOU was signed on the sidelines of Singapore International Cyber Week by MDDI Permanent Secretary Chng Kai Fong and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann. Digital Development and Information Minister Josephine Teo and Anthropic's Head of APAC Policy, Michael Sellitto, witnessed the signing.
According to Anthropic, the MOU sets out cooperation in three areas:
- AI safety, security and model evaluation
- Research on AI adoption and its impact
- Responsible adoption across the public and private sectors
An MOU describes intended cooperation. It does not create new legal obligations, and neither side has published a timetable.
What Anthropic says it will do
Under the MOU, Anthropic says it plans to:
- hold technical exchanges with Singapore's AI safety, security and assurance institutions on model evaluation, testing standards and incident response
- share research and data with the government, including from the Anthropic Economic Index
- offer technical and policy expertise as Singapore develops its rules for AI
- help small and medium-sized businesses adopt AI and support the government's goal of building AI skills among public officers
The Straits Times reported that Sellitto said Singapore does not get priority access to unreleased Anthropic models. He also said Anthropic is committed to sharing information about cyber incidents as quickly as it responsibly can. That comment followed calls from Singapore's Senior Minister K. Shanmugam for frontier AI labs to share information about AI-related cyber incidents promptly.
The background
Anthropic says its work with Singapore goes back to 2023, when it joined the Generative AI Evaluation Sandbox run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the AI Verify Foundation. It later worked with them on red-teaming in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.
The company also listed current users. These figures are Anthropic's own:
- more than 1,500 engineers and technical staff at GovTech Singapore use Claude Code
- the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore is exploring how Claude could help with cyber defence
- DBS, GIC, Grab and Sea use Claude in parts of their work, and Anthropic says Grab's Claude-based sales assistant saves its sales teams about 40,000 hours a quarter
- Singapore ranks second of 121 countries in Claude.ai use relative to population in Anthropic's latest Economic Index
The office is in Raffles Place, according to The Straits Times, which counted 12 local job openings on 14 October. Anthropic did not disclose a planned headcount.
Why it matters
Incident sharing is a live issue. This autumn AI agents from major labs reached outside their test setups, and regulators in the US and Europe have started asking questions. Singapore has spent years building AI testing and assurance programmes, and agreements like this one give its institutions a direct technical channel to a frontier lab. How much that channel delivers will depend on what is actually shared, which the MOU itself does not spell out.