The artificial intelligence (AI) platform race is becoming increasingly competitive across Asia’s startup ecosystem, as new data from Singapore-based Aspire shows Anthropic’s Claude rapidly gaining ground on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, while a growing number of startups are adopting multiple AI platforms simultaneously as AI becomes embedded into day-to-day operations.

According to the report, a year ago, OpenAI had more than four times as many paying clients as Anthropic among Singapore startups.

Today, that ratio has narrowed to just 1.5 times. Anthropic’s Claude customer base grew 258 percent year-on-year, while total spend increased 17 times.

Over the same period, ChatGPT’s customer base grew 79 percent.

The findings come from Startup Signals: Decoding the Forces Shaping Asia’s Next Generation of Businesses, a new report from Aspire analyzing anonymized and aggregated transaction data from more than 10,000 businesses across Singapore and Hong Kong.

The report examines the spending patterns that sit at the center of modern company-building: AI and software, payroll, travel and workspace.

According to the report, the number of Singapore startups using AI tools grew 42 percent year-on-year. But the more significant shift is in how they use them.

Companies running three or more AI platforms simultaneously more than doubled, suggesting AI has moved beyond experimentation and into core operational infrastructure, with specialized tools serving specialized functions across coding, content creation, research, customer support and workflow automation.

Additionally, Claude now accounts for 37 percent of all AI platform spend despite having fewer users than ChatGPT, reflecting growing adoption among startups drawn to its developer tooling, workflow integrations and agent-based use cases.

The report also highlighted how startup operating models continue to evolve.

Payroll activity increased sharply across Southeast Asia, with the Philippines growing 19 percent and Malaysia 52 percent as payroll destinations.

Meanwhile, India recorded its first decline in the dataset, falling 9 percent year-on-year.

One in five Singapore startups now pays workers on an ad-hoc basis, pointing to a growing contractor and freelance workforce operating alongside traditional teams.

Median payroll fell from $3,535 to $3,318 year-on-year, while compensation among higher earners remained largely unchanged.

Business travel also remains a strategic investment despite continued pressure on operating costs.

Singapore startup travel spend grew 11 percent year-on-year, with flights increasing 35 percent and accounting for nearly half of all travel expenditure.

The report also showed that despite years of discussion around remote work, physical offices continue to play a significant role in startup operations.

Office-related spending now accounts for 44 percent of infrastructure costs — exceeding cloud and remote work tooling combined.

However, the nature of that spending is changing. Fixed lease and utility costs contracted while coworking spend nearly doubled, with IWG growing 90 percent and WeWork 80 percent.

The findings also suggest startups are recommitting to physical presence while favoring flexible workspace models over long-term commitments.

“Startups often act as an early indicator of where broader business adoption is heading,

“They move faster, experiment more freely and respond to economic pressure sooner than larger organizations,” said Andrea Baronchelli, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Aspire.

“What’s striking is how quickly these patterns are evolving. Many of the trends highlighted in this report barely existed a year ago, and by the end of this year the landscape could look very different again,

“What we’re seeing is the emergence of a new generation of businesses that are increasingly AI-native, globally distributed and able to scale with far greater flexibility than before,” he added.

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