Singapore has on Wednesday announced new global initiatives and collaborations to strengthen the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and accelerate responsible AI adoption, putting the city state at the forefront of efforts to operationalize AI safety, accelerate capability development, and promote international cooperation for AI.

According to a statement, Josephine Teo, the Minister for Digital Development and Information of Singapore, has unveiled updates to Singapore’s Large Language Model – Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network (MERaLiON) – and launched the MERaLiON Consortium, a significant boost to Southeast Asia’s AI capabilities.

MERaLiON, a large language model developed by A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (A*STAR I2R) and supported by IMDA, breaks new ground in regional AI capabilities with enhanced multilingual processing and emotional intelligence.

The model now expertly handles Malay, Tamil, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, and Vietnamese on top of English, Mandarin and Singlish, with advanced code-switching abilities and emotion recognition features.

These improvements enable more intuitive and culturally aware AI applications in Southeast Asia, which could be applied to customer service, social service, and marketing
sectors.

To accelerate adoption, IMDA and A*STAR I2R have launched the MERaLiON Consortium, a collaborative platform that brings together local and global industry players and
research and development (R&D) institutions like HTX, MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT), NCS, National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, SPH Media and ST Engineering with leading technology companies like Axiom IT Solutions, BytePlus, CommonTown, DBS Bank, Grab and Microsoft Singapore.

The consortium will focus on developing practical AI applications, from multilingual customer support to health and emotional insight detection and agentic decision-making systems.

Since its initial release in December 2024, MERaLiON’s first version has garnered over 90,000 downloads globally, attracting users from corporate research labs, media service
providers, startups, and academics.

It is noted that in the area of AI safety research, Singapore was the site of global cooperation in identifying and prioritizing research domains which saw the publishing of “The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities” (The Singapore Consensus).

“The Singapore Consensus” is a living document that will serve as the foundation for the ATxSG government-to-government (G2G) Ministerial Roundtable on Digital Trust which seeks to bridge science to policy, and translate technical research into practical policies, by facilitating meaningful conversations between AI scientists and policymakers.

Singapore is also continuing its efforts to align international AI governance frameworks.

The AI Verify Testing Framework was first introduced in 2022 for traditional AI.

“We have since enhanced the Framework to address both Generative AI (Gen AI) and traditional AI risks,

“In continued collaboration with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), we developed a crosswalk to map the enhanced Framework with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework: Gen AI Profile,” said the statement.

It added that this reaffirms the alignment between the two countries’ AI governance frameworks and reflects our shared commitment to cooperation.

These initiatives underscore Singapore’s commitment to building foundational infrastructure for AI safety development and testing that is grounded in scientific evidence; and uniting researchers, policymakers, and businesses to co-develop implementable, interoperable frameworks for responsible AI at scale.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s AI Safety Institute signed a joint statement with France’s AI Safety Institute to kickstart collaboration and cooperation on AI safety and cooperation on Wednesday.

The joint statement was signed between Teo, and French Minister Delegate of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologues, Clara Chappaz at ATx 2025.

It is noted that Singapore and US also spearhead the Global Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) Certification for businesses to facilitate trusted cross border data flows, providing access to nine economies with about 40 trillion in market size and counting.

The certification will allow organizations to demonstrate compliance with internationally recognized data protection standards.

Organizations such as OCBC, IBM and Mastercard are currently certified under the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation CBPR certification and will be certified under the Global CBPR certification.

Meanwhile, Enigma Health, a spinoff from SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Center, has signed two strategic partnerships with Roche and ST Engineering’s Enterprise Digital to expand its reach and capabilities on Tuesday.

These two new partnerships will accelerate clinical trials, market access, insights and business intelligence to help with patients’ care and access to novel drugs and digital technologies.

Enigma Health’s flagship product, Enigma, is Singapore’s home-grown sovereign healthcare agentic AI platform developed by a team of clinicians and AI scientists to improve workflow optimization, streamlining data-intensive and time-consuming processes while ensuring robust data security and regulatory compliance.

It has been piloted at SingHealth institutions.

Looking ahead, Enigma Health will be scaling up implementation of the platform across SingHealth.

Meanwhile, IMDA and Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) have also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to combat telecommunications fraud across ASEAN.

The partnership will focus on sharing intelligence on scam trends and patterns; developing stronger preventive measures; analyzing international call traffic to identify vulnerabilities; raising regional baseline security standards.

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