On Sept. 16, Anthropic announced its expansion to Singapore, making the Southeast Asian city its fifth location in Asia-Pacific, following hubs in Tokyo, Seoul, Bengalaru and Sydney. The Singapore office will open in October.

“As we grow across Asia-Pacific, opening an office in Singapore—where Claude usage per capita is among the highest in the world—is a natural next step,” Chris Ciauri, Anthropic’s international managing director, said in a press release on Sept 16. 

According to Anthropic data, Singapore was ranked second out of 121 countries in Claude usage, behind Australia.

Anthropic’s regional expansion will be led by Dale Finlay, who joins the Claude developer after just 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,” Finlay said in Anthropic’s press release. “Once that trust exists, the real work is embedding AI into how the business actually operates.”

By expanding to Southeast Asia, Anthropic is catching up to its rival OpenAI, which opened its Asia headquarters in Singapore in late 2024. Just last month, the Business Times reported that OpenAI was planning to lease 100,000 square feet of new office space in Singapore. OpenAI also just hired Sandhya Devanathan, Meta’s head for South Asia, as its new ASEAN and Australia head.

Increasingly crowded

Singapore has long served as a “port of entry” to Southeast Asia, thanks to its stable political environment and business-friendly policies. The same has been true of AI: Companies like Cognition and Sierra have picked Singapore as their ASEAN or Asia headquarters.

Singapore has hopes of becoming an “AI nation,” with the country committing over $1 billion Singapore dollars (over $770 million) to strengthen public AI capabilities.

San Francisco-headquartered Plaud, which manufactures AI-powered note-takers, also opened its regional headquarters in Singapore on Sept 16. The office will serve as Plaud’s “base of operations” across twelve Asia-Pacific markets, including India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.

“We started in Singapore with a very modest idea that we should start building a data engineering team,” said Nathan Xu, Plaud’s CEO and co-founder, at the company’s office launch event. “In about nine months, we grew the team from 10 people to about 100.” The firm also announced that it would be investing $20 million Singapore dollars, or $15.7 million, to accelerate 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,” Xu said in a Sept 16 press release. “If we can make AI feel natural here, we can make it feel natural anywhere in the world.”