Anthropic is opening an office in Singapore in October, marking its first base in south-east Asia as the artificial intelligence company expands its presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Singapore office will be Anthropic’s fifth location in the region, following hubs in Tokyo, Seoul, Bengaluru and Sydney. The company said the city was a natural next step because Claude usage per head there is among the highest in the world.
Anthropic’s data ranks Singapore second among 121 countries for Claude usage, behind Australia. Chris Ciauri, the company’s international managing director, said the expansion reflected the country’s importance to its regional growth.
The south-east Asian operation will be led by Dale Finlay, who joined Anthropic after six months as OpenAI’s regional go-to-market head.
“From working with customers across Southeast Asia, I’ve seen that ambition isn’t the blocker to AI adoption—trust is,” Mr Finlay said. “Once that trust exists, the real work is embedding AI into how the business actually operates.”
Anthropic follows OpenAI into Singapore
The move brings Anthropic into closer competition with OpenAI, which opened its Asia headquarters in Singapore in late 2024. OpenAI was also reported last month to be planning to lease 100,000 square feet of additional office space in the city.
OpenAI has appointed Sandhya Devanathan, Meta’s head for South Asia, as its new head for Asean and Australia. Singapore has become a prominent entry point for technology companies seeking to build a presence across south-east Asia, supported by its political stability and business-friendly policies.
Companies including Cognition and Sierra have chosen the city as an Asean or Asia headquarters. Singapore is also seeking to establish itself as an “AI nation”, having committed more than 1 billion Singapore dollars, equivalent to over 770 million US dollars, to strengthen public artificial intelligence capabilities.
The market is attracting other companies as well. Plaud, the San Francisco-based maker of AI-powered note-taking devices, announced on 16 September that it had opened its regional headquarters in Singapore to serve 12 Asia-Pacific markets.
Plaud chief executive and co-founder Nathan Xu said the company had grown its Singapore team from 10 people to about 100 in nine months. It plans to invest 20 million Singapore dollars, or 15.7 million US dollars, in engineering and product development in the country.
“Asia is one of the hardest places in the world to build AI that understands context and intent because people switch seamlessly between languages, dialects and contexts,” Mr Xu said. “If we can make AI feel natural here, we can make it feel natural anywhere in the world.”
