Goldman Sachs has restricted Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub to its engineers, cutting off traders and bankers who used the tools to track client flows and build market models. The bank barred its Hong Kong bankers from Claude in April and is now a lead underwriter on Anthropic's IPO. Most traders and bankers can no longer use AI coding tools at work.
Internal guidance updated in October restricts Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub to the bank's engineers, Bloomberg News reported, following a review of productivity and risk concerns. Strats, who work across trading, quantitative research and software engineering, still have access. The change has frustrated some traders who had been using the tools to monitor client trading flows, model market moves and positions, and create written and graphic material.
Goldman spokesperson Nick Carcaterra said the bank makes certain AI tools available to staff to determine the best use cases across the firm. Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti was praising trader-built tools in July, telling Bloomberg that non-technical employees had built tools with AI and passed them to engineers, of whom there are about 12,000, to be improved. That arrangement let people closest to a problem build a first version without waiting for engineering time.
It also meant thousands of employees without engineering training were running software that writes and executes code, on the same machines they use to handle client information. At a conference in Turin last month, Argenti described Goldman's AI adoption in waves and said developers, more than 12,000 of the bank's roughly 47,000 staff, had made up the first wave. The October guidance limits the coding agents to that group.
Goldman restricted Claude in Hong Kong in April. In April, Goldman removed Claude from its internal AI platform for bankers in Hong Kong. The Financial Times reported that the bank had read its contract with Anthropic strictly, and an Anthropic spokesperson said Claude had never been officially supported in Hong Kong.
Chat GPT and Gemini remained available there. JPMorgan removed Claude from its Hong Kong approved list in June. Goldman's in-house AI assistant, which uses models from several companies, is still available across the firm.
The restriction applies to third-party agents that can write and run code by themselves. Goldman and Morgan Stanley are also the lead underwriters on Anthropic's IPO, according to the S-1 filed October 26. Anthropic is expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT before the end of November.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing