Anthropic will open its Singapore office in October, making it the company's fifth office in the Asia-Pacific region after Tokyo, Bengaluru, Seoul, and Sydney. The move underscores the AI company's push into Singapore as demand for Claude surges across startups, large enterprises, and government agencies.

Anthropic has announced a third-party on-site evaluation program, bringing in staff from Faculty, the AI company owned by Accenture, to test model safety measures with near-employee access. The two sides have each committed at least US$1 billion over the next five years to build what Anthropic calls a third-party embedded evaluation mechanism.

GMI Technology, a Taiwan-based electronics component distributor and application solutions provider, said its AI computing rental business is booming, with strong demand from US technology companies for computing power. The company said large users tend to secure computing capacity through long-term contracts, leaving the market short of supply.

Microsoft is changing how companies evaluate their generative AI investments, as the technology evolves from its beginnings as a productivity tool into deeper uses in core business workflows. In addition to token consumption and model costs, Microsoft Taiwan general manager Sean Pien points out that corporations are also examining how AI actually benefits workflows and innovation, making return-on-investment (ROI) evaluations harder to judge solely on the basis of time or labor savings.