Anthropic's Claude Gains Ground on ChatGPT Among Singapore Startups as AI Spend Surges 17x
Source: TNGlobal
Anthropic's Claude has dramatically narrowed its gap with OpenAI's ChatGPT among Singapore startups, with paying customers surging 258 percent year-on-year and total spend multiplying 17 times, according to fresh data from Aspire's Startup Signals report analysing transaction data from more than 10,000 businesses.
Anthropic's Claude has dramatically narrowed its gap with OpenAI's ChatGPT among Singapore startups, with paying customers surging 258 percent year-on-year and total spend multiplying 17 times, according to fresh data from financial platform Aspire.
The findings come from Aspire's "Startup Signals" report, which analysed transaction data from more than 10,000 businesses across Singapore and Hong Kong. A year ago, OpenAI had more than four times as many paying startup clients as Anthropic in the city-state. That ratio has now compressed to just 1.5 times. Claude currently accounts for 37 percent of all AI platform spending among Singapore startups despite having fewer users than ChatGPT — a sign that startups gravitating toward Claude are spending heavily on developer tooling, workflow integrations, and agent-based use cases.
ChatGPT's customer base grew 79 percent over the same period, so both platforms are expanding. But Claude's trajectory is markedly steeper: the 258 percent client growth rate and 17x spend increase reflect a market in which Anthropic's platform is winning over startups that need advanced reasoning, code generation, and agent orchestration capabilities. Overall, the number of Singapore startups using AI tools rose 42 percent year-on-year, and those running three or more AI platforms simultaneously more than doubled — evidence that artificial intelligence has moved decisively from experimental side-project to core operational infrastructure.
Why it matters for Singapore: The data paints a picture of a startup ecosystem that is rapidly becoming AI-native. Singapore's position as Southeast Asia's most active venture hub means these adoption patterns ripple outward to the region's broader business landscape. With GIC — one of Singapore's sovereign wealth funds — having led Anthropic's Series G funding round and recently co-hosting an event with the company's leadership, the city-state is not just a consumer of AI platforms but a strategic investor in the winners of the AI platform race.