Anthropic's Claude Gains Ground on ChatGPT Among Singapore Startups
Source: TechNode Global
Anthropic's Claude grew its customer base 258% year-on-year among Singapore startups, narrowing OpenAI's lead from 4x to 1.5x, as Aspire data shows AI has become core infrastructure across the city-state's startup ecosystem.
Anthropic's Claude has rapidly gained ground on OpenAI's ChatGPT among Singapore startups, with its customer base growing 258 percent year-on-year and total spend increasing 17-fold, according to new data from Singapore-based fintech platform Aspire.
A year ago, OpenAI had more than four times as many paying startup clients as Anthropic in Singapore. That ratio has now narrowed to 1.5 times. Claude now accounts for 37 percent of all AI platform spend among Aspire's customers despite having fewer users than ChatGPT, reflecting growing adoption among startups drawn to its developer tooling, workflow integrations, and agent-based use cases. Over the same period, ChatGPT's customer base grew 79 percent.
The data comes from Aspire's "Startup Signals" report, which analysed transaction data from more than 10,000 businesses across Singapore and Hong Kong. It found that the number of Singapore startups using AI tools grew 42 percent year-on-year, while companies running three or more AI platforms simultaneously more than doubled. Andrea Baronchelli, co-founder and CEO of Aspire, said startups act as an early indicator of where broader business adoption is heading, and that what is emerging is a generation of businesses that are increasingly AI-native and globally distributed.
The shift towards multiple AI platforms suggests that AI has moved beyond experimentation into core operational infrastructure, serving specialised functions across coding, content creation, research, customer support, and workflow automation. This trend mirrors findings from other recent reports showing that Singaporean enterprises are stacking AI tools rather than committing to a single platform.
Why it matters for Singapore: With the highest AI startup density in Southeast Asia, Singapore is ground zero for the platform battle between frontier AI providers. The rapid narrowing of OpenAI's lead signals that startups here are optimising for specific use cases rather than brand loyalty, and that developer tooling and integration quality increasingly determine which platform wins. For Singapore's ambition to become a global AI hub, a competitive AI platform market is good news — it drives down costs and expands the tooling available to local builders.