Anthropic officially opens Tokyo office, signs Memorandum of Cooperation with the Japan AI Safety Institute (www.anthropic.com)

Anthropic opened its first Asia-Pacific office in Tokyo and signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with the Japan AI Safety Institute, marking a major step in the company’s international expansion and government engagement. CEO Dario Amodei met senior Japanese officials and the LDP Digitization Headquarters, signaling tighter ties with policymakers as Anthropic pledges to collaborate on cross-border AI evaluation standards—shared methodologies to assess capabilities, test systems, and monitor emerging risks. The agreement builds on Anthropic’s existing pacts with the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the UK’s AI Security Institute, which jointly evaluated Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Nov 2024, and complements its membership in the Hiroshima AI Process Friends Group. The move has concrete industry implications: Anthropic is positioning Claude as a productivity-first tool in Japan where its Economic Index ranks the country in the top quartile for AI adoption. Early deployments include autonomous coding at Rakuten, rapid document analysis at Nomura Research Institute, Panasonic’s enterprise and consumer integrations, and Classmethod reporting 10x productivity gains with Claude Code producing 99% of a project’s codebase. Anthropic also extended cultural partnerships (Mori Art Museum), hosted a Tokyo Builder Summit for 150+ startups, and plans further APAC expansion to Seoul and Bengaluru—signaling both commercial momentum (10x run-rate growth in APAC) and an emphasis on interoperable safety benchmarking.