Projected Expenditure on Government's Pursuit of Global Leadership in Growth Areas and AI-empowered Economy

11 Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Minister for Digital Development and Information (a) what is the projected expenditure on the Government’s strategies for global leadership in growth areas and an AI-empowered economy; (b) whether the Government will fund ambitious exploratory projects with breakout growth potential through a Government-owned AI corporation; and (c) whether the Government considers such entities more effective than foreign entities at pursuing projects where data sovereignty and public interest are paramount.

The Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information (Mr Tan Kiat How) (for the Minister for Digital Development and Information): Under Singapore's National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy 2.0, we seek to harness AI for the public good and to improve the lives of Singaporeans. This vision is supported by making investments across both the public and private sectors, building up AI capabilities in research, government and industry, and applying AI to solve real-world problems.

In developing these capabilities, we consider what serves Singapore's needs, alongside other factors, such as the performance, security, resilience and cost-effectiveness of the technology. There is due regard for data security and the public interest. We leverage local capabilities and partner with international entities, including leading companies who can impart knowledge, build skills and create local jobs.

The Member may refer to the upcoming 2026 Budget Statement and the Committee of Supply debates for more details on how Singapore will develop an AI-empowered economy.

Mr Speaker: Mr Giam.

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song (Aljunied): I thank the Senior Minister of State for the reply. Sir, does the Government have any concerns that our AI landscape will be dominated by global technology giants? How will the Ministry prevent what is called a "data drain" where these companies use our public data or public grants to build superior proprietary models, and that they eventually charge Singaporean subscriptions for or risk forcing local firms into a position of enduring technical dependency?

Secondly, will the Senior Minister of State consider a policy where any foreign firm using Singapore's public data sets for AI training must commit to a structured local knowledge transfer programme and share a portion of the resulting intellectual property with Singaporean firms?

And lastly, given that public data sets are a national resource, will the Government consider charging commercial AI developers, particularly foreign-based ones, a fee for training their models on these sets and how will this revenue be accounted for and publicised to ensure it is used for the delivery of public goods?

Mr Tan Kiat How: Sir, regardless of whether the companies are domiciled here or are domiciled outside Singapore, I think it is very clear that we have robust data protection framework to facilitate the secure processing of data.

For the private sector, all organisations must comply with their obligations under the Personal Data Protection Act. Examples of these obligations include the Protection Obligation to protect personal data in their possession from unauthorised access and the Transfer Limitation Obligation, which applies when data is transferred to another country, regardless of whether they use the data for processing it for Singapore clients, or for something else, including training data for their AI models.

These organisations must also comply with any additional data regulations which apply to their sectors, and as the Member has alluded to, that includes the Government as a sector, but there are also financial sectors, telecommunications, healthcare, logistics and so forth. These sectors may have its own specific set of requirements.

In this House, we just had a debate on the Second Reading of the Health Information Bill as well as the Public Sector Governance Act, which impose similar requirements and safeguards to ensure high standards of data security. Such data can only be shared, and that is for the public sector data that the Member has mentioned if there is a legitimate purpose to support the public interest, and the Ministerial authorisation and contractual agreements for data protection and data security are in place.

His other questions around the specifics of the commercial model, the business model, these have to be use case specific and driven by the use case problems and the relevant agencies looking after it.