The most interesting part of this announcement is the timing. GS is leading Anthropic's IPO, what motivated them to announce this a few weeks before trading starts?
Regardless of tech tool, non-tech writing POCs they try to force tech to get into production is a timeless story. LLM just allows people to get there faster, with less knowledge of coding.. which leads to the actual problem I think.
Banks have a ton of legal/compliance/reglatory/reputational concerns about application access/entitleements, data privacy, data licensing, granular data entitlements, data access (auditable).. approval chains (auditable), as well as actual financial risk.
My wife is an MD and I got her using Claude Code for all sorts of tasks adjacent to but not actually generating code that will be used by others. I am quite sure Claude is writing code to accomplish the tasks she asks for, but she doesn't really know or care about that. She also uses Claude for family stuff, she had Claude build us a packing list artifact that helps us pack for our family vacations, and he now manages our address book, friends birthdays, an other family administrivia.
I was using Claude Code yesterday for iterating with Claude Design. At some point it got faster and started producing screenshot PNGs of the canvas locally. I asked it what was up and it said that it wrote a local renderer to simulate the Claude canvas runtime.
Well the real question is: Is this about using AI, or switching from public AI to private AI, or about Anthropic having access to confidential information of their own underwriter?
Look no further than the recent email leak story. The tool is quite powerful and I can see the argument that at an enterprise / risk management level it should only be used by those capable of reviewing it.
I dunno, I have a lot more sympathy for non-technical users writing slop than engineers. I think it's really great that more people get to "properly" use the computer, in that they experience a flexible programmable environment, rather than a fixed set of discreet programs "take it or leave it".
If the issue is security, a much more interesting problem for the engineering team to do is design the programming environment for the bankers so they cannot hurt themselves.
If the issue a performance, designing great abstractions that the bankers' agents can use is "low code done right".
I hope the bankers rebel hard against this policy change!
The ability of bankers or traders to even create an app that others can run, without any IT review/approval process is probable a compliance issue in and of itself.
There are things simple building blocks don't prevent in the event of nefarious or stupid behavior.
Imagine a nefarious banker creates an app that lets him talk to a trader on the other side of the "Chinese wall" about M&A deal flow without getting caught because they are avoiding monitored channels like email, slack, phone, zoom.
Imagine an idiot writes an app that scans his email and summarizes client information he is privy to and writes it to some database that his app then serves up to others on the trading desk. He is unaware that entitlements exist, and by giving others access to his new app he has broken them. Btw summarizing email is a HUGE use case across non-technical users in finance that they are very excited about.
I feel the same way. There's also a lot of startups promising this future but none of them are technically equipped to deliver it. I think almost every company is going to have an interesting ecosystem of internal apis in the future.
Yeah it should be a dialogue with bankers / front office. It can even be "OK if you wanna do this, we gotta teach you at a high level how the computer works, so we can figure out broad company policy together". Done right the rest of company finally gives a shit (because they want to keep their cool new personalized toys), and it's never been a better time to be back office IT.
In certain industries, compliance/lack thereof has serious consequences, so it might be more to do with that rather than punishing non-technical users just for using AI. For example, if an AI model trains on your internal financials, and someone else uses it to make a quick buck, then that's insider trading. Things like that.
Good security policies always contain building blocks. If your security realies on low-privilage code been fully human-auditted, you've already lost.
Only select high privilege code, where we don't know how to make it "secure by construction", should depend on full audits.
The right use-case here is "custom homegrown Bloomberg Terminal add-ons", not autonomous trading software that can see everything and also isn't routed through trading risk software.
The issue is probably an overwhelming amount of slop like PoCs, presentations on every topic, claude artifacts with 1000 pages instead if 10 liner in the chat.
All this is just counter productive and drowns everyone is slop.
Yeah, I wonder if the medium term shift here is away from CC (which runs on your own machine and is super risky if you have sensitive client information) to something like Claude Managed Agents, where everything is sandboxed.
Or just the Claude app with local execution disabled by org policy, if that’s a thing.
There have been a lot of recent issues with LLMs finding security bugs quickly. If the issue is security, they need to design the bulletproof platform first, then give the less-technical users access to it.
I dunno if rebellion is the right framing. Maybe pulling the organization toward their side instead. Ultimate the “bankers” at an investment company decide where the company is going, after all. Grabbing your own steering wheel isn’t rebellion.
Internal guidance updated in October restricts Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub to the bank's engineers
There. Now only devs can use Claude Code. That makes sense.
Has nothing to do with AI being bad. Good engineers have a mind for it. They tend to be more detailed oriented. Understands how parts connect. Understands the pros and cons of approaches. Can see when the AI does something stupid. Probably knows a better way if the AI veers off.
We don’t ask software engineers to file Goldman Sachs yearly company taxes using just AI right without any expertise right?
We don’t ask engineers to go out and do cold calls for sales right? Engineers don’t have the mind for that. They’d suck at it.
We don’t ask sales people to write programs right? Have you met a sales person? They’re the opposite of builders. They lie, take corners to close a deal. You can’t do that building a real production system.
> There. Now only devs can use Claude Code. That makes sense.
This hardly makes sense to me. Claude Code is an excellent tool for running your environment and augmenting your productivity. Most traders are sharp folks who could use CC to great effect I am sure. I'd be super annoyed.
It does make sense. But the problem is that no one wants to spend a few trillion dollars on a nice tool for devs. The investors want the magic wish-granting genie they were promised.[1]
Yeah, this is more likely to not waste engineers time while dipshits vibe code their own "tools" and demand that they are production ready despite being said dipshit.
> "He told Bloomberg that traders and bankers had built tools with AI and passed them to the firm's engineers, of whom there are about 12,000, to be improved."
As someone who has been on the receiving end of many of these tools, I feel 'improved' is doing some heavy lifting here.
Completely overhauled to be operationally viable, perhaps.
Thrown into the dark recesses of the backlog, more likely.
I have a non technical friend who's been building apps for his (much smaller than goldman) investment bank just as an ingestion for their old pitch decks, deal documents, live deal agent that can surface tasks from emails and then work on things for the bankers. Been impressed with how seriously he's getting into CI, SDLC, etc but I don't think most management or business users are on the same page he is.
> A trading floor is a bad place for unreviewed code written by people who can't read it, and the information barrier problem would be reason enough on its own. Requiring that agent-written code come from people trained to review it is a sensible rule for a regulated business.
Jokes on them: devs are also losing the capacity to read the code. Can't mix move fast, high volume with "read code".
I bet engineering loved traders tossing vibe-coded crap across the wall and demanding it be productionized. "It can't be hard, after all I've already written the code for you."
For decades Wall Street traders have been throwing spreadsheets over the wall at developers to be productionized.
The details are very different, but variations on this theme have played out for a long time. I have seen fixed income instrument modeling systems 20 years ago that allowed Traders to put in limited C++ code to define new exotic instruments.
OK so when push came to shove, the frontier of LLMs were not trusted at Goldman Sachs. Maybe more banks to follow? Maybe other professions? The market cap for that juicy 2 trillion dollar evaluation shrinks for each one. Especially bad if the financial system itself doesn't trust the product.
Just on another thread today or yesterday we have a Claude code developer saying “permissions are old hat”… so not shocking that a business with real infosec concerns would dial back on the product.
Banks have a ton of legal/compliance/reglatory/reputational concerns about application access/entitleements, data privacy, data licensing, granular data entitlements, data access (auditable).. approval chains (auditable), as well as actual financial risk.
Just fyi.
The UK is very good at banking.
But DEFINITELY NOT Barclays.
If the issue is security, a much more interesting problem for the engineering team to do is design the programming environment for the bankers so they cannot hurt themselves.
If the issue a performance, designing great abstractions that the bankers' agents can use is "low code done right".
I hope the bankers rebel hard against this policy change!
There are things simple building blocks don't prevent in the event of nefarious or stupid behavior.
Imagine a nefarious banker creates an app that lets him talk to a trader on the other side of the "Chinese wall" about M&A deal flow without getting caught because they are avoiding monitored channels like email, slack, phone, zoom.
Imagine an idiot writes an app that scans his email and summarizes client information he is privy to and writes it to some database that his app then serves up to others on the trading desk. He is unaware that entitlements exist, and by giving others access to his new app he has broken them. Btw summarizing email is a HUGE use case across non-technical users in finance that they are very excited about.
Only select high privilege code, where we don't know how to make it "secure by construction", should depend on full audits.
The right use-case here is "custom homegrown Bloomberg Terminal add-ons", not autonomous trading software that can see everything and also isn't routed through trading risk software.
All this is just counter productive and drowns everyone is slop.
Or just the Claude app with local execution disabled by org policy, if that’s a thing.
I dunno if rebellion is the right framing. Maybe pulling the organization toward their side instead. Ultimate the “bankers” at an investment company decide where the company is going, after all. Grabbing your own steering wheel isn’t rebellion.
Sounds like the web platform.
Has nothing to do with AI being bad. Good engineers have a mind for it. They tend to be more detailed oriented. Understands how parts connect. Understands the pros and cons of approaches. Can see when the AI does something stupid. Probably knows a better way if the AI veers off.
We don’t ask software engineers to file Goldman Sachs yearly company taxes using just AI right without any expertise right?
We don’t ask engineers to go out and do cold calls for sales right? Engineers don’t have the mind for that. They’d suck at it.
We don’t ask sales people to write programs right? Have you met a sales person? They’re the opposite of builders. They lie, take corners to close a deal. You can’t do that building a real production system.
This hardly makes sense to me. Claude Code is an excellent tool for running your environment and augmenting your productivity. Most traders are sharp folks who could use CC to great effect I am sure. I'd be super annoyed.
1.https://www.the-independent.com/tech/chatgpt-ai-cancer-cure-...
I never like these kinds of statements because it makes so AI can’t ever be critiqued. You can always go “well that’s a bad engineer.”
As someone who has been on the receiving end of many of these tools, I feel 'improved' is doing some heavy lifting here.
Completely overhauled to be operationally viable, perhaps.
Thrown into the dark recesses of the backlog, more likely.
Agentic engineering needs to be "all in".
The details are very different, but variations on this theme have played out for a long time. I have seen fixed income instrument modeling systems 20 years ago that allowed Traders to put in limited C++ code to define new exotic instruments.
At least that stuff had guardrails around it.