Technology 4 min read By Bethany Hadley
Anthropic to open Singapore office in October as US AI firms race for Southeast Asia
Anthropic will open its first Southeast Asian office in Singapore in October, its fifth Asia-Pacific hub, as it competes with OpenAI for regional AI adoption. The move follows OpenAI's Singapore headquarters and a wave of AI firms using the city-state as a gateway to the region.
Anthropic is to open an office in Singapore in October, its first in Southeast Asia, as the US artificial intelligence developer moves to close the gap with rival OpenAI in one of the world's fastest-growing AI markets.
The San Francisco-based company said the new hub would be its fifth location in Asia-Pacific, following Tokyo, Seoul, Bengaluru and Sydney. Singapore was chosen in part because Claude usage per capita there is among the highest in the world, according to Anthropic data, which ranked the city-state second out of 121 countries behind Australia.
«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 statement announcing the expansion.
The regional push will be led by Dale Finlay, who joins Anthropic after six months as OpenAI's regional go-to-market head. Finlay said the main obstacle to AI adoption in Southeast Asia is not ambition but trust. «Once that trust exists, the real work is embedding AI into how the business actually operates,» he said.
The Singapore office puts Anthropic in more direct competition with OpenAI, which opened its Asia headquarters in the city-state in late 2024. OpenAI is planning to lease 100,000 square feet of new office space in Singapore, and has hired Sandya Devanathan, formerly Meta's head for South Asia, as its new head for ASEAN and Australia.
Singapore has long served as a port of entry to Southeast Asia, thanks to its stable political environment and business-friendly policies, and the same logic is now drawing AI companies. Cognition and Sierra have both chosen the city-state for their ASEAN or Asia headquarters, while San Francisco-based Plaud, which makes AI-powered note-takers, opened its regional headquarters there on the same day Anthropic announced its plans.
Plaud said the office would act as its base of operations across twelve Asia-Pacific markets, including India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. The company also said it would invest S$20 million, or about $15.7 million, to accelerate engineering and product development in the country.
«We started in Singapore with a very modest idea that we should start building a data engineering team,» Nathan Xu, Plaud's chief executive and co-founder, said at the office launch. «In about nine months, we grew the team from 10 people to about 100.»
Xu argued that building AI for Asia requires handling rapid switches between languages, dialects and contexts, and that success in the region could translate into global products. «If we can make AI feel natural here, we can make it feel natural anywhere in the world,» he said.
The arrivals reflect Singapore's ambition to become an «AI nation». The government has committed more than S$1 billion, equivalent to over $770 million, to strengthen public AI capabilities, part of a broader effort to attract investment and talent in the sector.
For Anthropic, the Singapore office is a bet that proximity to customers and regulators will help it win business in a region where trust and local context are seen as decisive. The company's Asia-Pacific expansion now spans five markets, with Singapore set to become its newest base from October.
