Goldman Sachs is pulling Claude Code from its bankers and traders

Original source appears to be Bloomberg via https://www.fa-mag.com/news/goldman-restricts-traders-and-ba... , with State of AI being some kind of AI-written site run by a spam company.

• anon7725 · 11 hours ago

  somehow that "State of AI" site skates right past uBlock - weird.

> 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". Agentic engineering needs to be "all in".

• 0c3ca83 · 11 hours ago

  At which point it's vibe coding, not engineering.

  • CharlieDigital · 9 hours ago

    That's how I see it. You have to go all in on agentic engineering. And if you're all in on agentic engineering and doing it well, then anyone should be able to build safely and no one needs to look at code. The code should look highly consistent and agents should be enforcing best practices, approved architecture, running security scanning, etc. The gains at the middleground compromise are not really significant and, IMO, creates frustration and friction. Works best to go all in. GS should let everyone have CC and GH and focus on making their enterprise harness safer for everyone.

    • 0c3ca83 · 8 hours ago

      LMAO. If nobody is looking at the code, how would you know, and why would you care? And, no, it doesn't actually work. Agentic engineering is a myth by people who got high on their own farts.

• reactordev · 11 hours ago

  Worse, instructed to just keep prompting and not even look at it, let the software factory review and regen if quality < 0.8

• threatofrain · 9 hours ago

  Why must agentic engineering be all in?

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!

• CBLT · 11 hours ago

  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.

  • catchnear4321 · 11 hours ago

    we are all growing the same thing (internally)

  • Ericson2314 · 11 hours ago

    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.

• bagacrap · 11 hours ago

  > design the programming environment for the bankers so they cannot hurt themselves Sounds like the web platform.

• neya · 11 hours ago

  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.

  • Ericson2314 · 11 hours ago

    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.

• bee_rider · 11 hours ago

  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.

• theptip · 11 hours ago

  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.

  • SpicyLemonZest · 10 hours ago

    The sensitive data problems aren't just about sandboxing. If a systems development model at Anthropic discovers a clever optimization trick based on a customer's complaints to their account team, that's a great deal that saves a lot of work. If a trading model at Goldman discovers a clever pricing trick based on a customer's complaints to their account team, that's an enormous problem, even if the underlying data is never seen by anyone who Goldman wouldn't trust to handle it responsibly.

    • theptip · 10 hours ago

      Sure, but moving to CMA lets you enumerate the sources and assert the customer complaints are not visible to the workflows that shouldn’t have it. The “Claude can read everything” model is great for vibe coding but not suitable for regulated industries, which require more structure. My point is mostly that there is a middle ground that can preserve some of the wins; Claude can vibe up a CMA pipeline pretty quickly. There’s likely room for an internal platform to enforce required invariants though.

  • preg_match · 9 hours ago

    Even managed solutions are just mitigations, the "problem" is coding. Computer programs can do anything. This was gated before by knowledge, only coders could effectively write software, including malware and poor-security software. Now anybody can write software. The corporate computer is a locked-down environment, the set of actions you can perform are limited. They ideally should be the actions you need to do your job, and nothing more. Any method of writing and executing code breaks that wide open - you can now do anything, given enough time and effort. Now the time and effort floors have fallen, too. Claude Managed Agents might prevent the agents themselves from doing something nefarious, sure. But that was never the draw of AI. The ideal use of AI is doing the least amount of stuff with AI, and the most amount of stuff with code. Asking AI to sort my email? That's good, but writing a program to do that is better. Asking AI to do statistical analysis of my trades? Again, sure, but it's even better to write a program to do that.

• steveBK123 · 11 hours ago

  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.

  • motionlessveloc · 10 hours ago

    > 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. Back channel conversations have been happening since forever and hardly need vibe coded apps to pull off. They can use non-corp services on personal devices, or kick it old school and grab drinks at the bar downstairs.

    • steveBK123 · 10 hours ago

      The point is liability, plausibly deniability, etc. If a trader uses their personal cell / WhatsApp / etc in today's age, all the liability falls on that trader. If organize drinks with a coworker adhoc and communicate things they shouldn't.. the same. However, if a trader on their work PC, on the work network, in the office can communicate in electronic form on an unsecured, unmonitored channel.. the bank is paying a very large fine. This is like leaving gmail unblocked on work computer/network. Likewise if the bank itself organizes a monthly drinks between 2 departments on different side of the Chinese wall, offsite and things get communicated that shouldn't .. its obviously somewhat intentional by the bank and they will get fined.

    • KellyCriterion · 9 hours ago

      > Back channel conversations have been happening since forever and hardly need vibe coded apps Thats the reason why there are companies like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Reasoning (funded amongst others by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of that intelligence service)

  • KellyCriterion · 9 hours ago

    >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. Now worries! Its called the "citizen developer" today! :-D https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Developer

• risyachka · 11 hours ago

  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.

• thisisit · 10 hours ago

  > 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. Interesting take but it doesn't compute. When engineering team teams design programming environments so that people can't hurt themselves they will be locked into a "take it or leave it" set of environments. Also, you do know security isn't just about engineering, it is also about data right? How do you suppose it works when bankers who have day to day access to sensitive data as part of their job - upload it to AI? What to do then? Restrict data access? > rather than a fixed set of discreet programs "take it or leave it". This part always amuses me. AI boosters seem to think everyone hosting their own bespoke app is the next big thing. But who manages that? Banks are not tech giants. Most engineering teams don't bring in money and headcounts are strictly managed. As the article says: > "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." So, how does engineering with limited staff design a safe environment and improve 12k apps. I am sure Goldman's management wont be thrilled about increasing engineering headcount to match these expectations.

• croes · 10 hours ago

  Anthropic and OpenAI can’t design secure programming environments.

• ares623 · 10 hours ago

  > 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". You do realize you're contradicting yourself right? To get to a state where "bankers cannot hurt themselves" or "low code [is] done right" is to end up right back at the "take it or leave it" programs. Security was already addressed, by these "take it or leave it" programs. Add enough abstractions on top of each other that must be adhered to or else it falls apart, and what do you get? "take it or leave it" programs. This reminds me of the sovereign citizen movement that got really popular in 2019. The illusion of freedom feels great I'm sure. Until you realize you are entirely dependent on the existing infrastructure and the people who maintain it to enjoy the apparent freedom.

> Barclays is moving in the other direction Just fyi.

• steveBK123 · 11 hours ago

  If you had to follow a bank's strategy on basically anything, would you follow Goldman or Barclays?

  • sourdecor · 11 hours ago

    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?

    • xnickb · 11 hours ago

      If only there was a way to find out what the linked article is about. I'll go ask Claud if there are any ways to do that.

  • master_crab · 11 hours ago

    Maybe not Goldman. But DEFINITELY NOT Barclays.

    • steveBK123 · 11 hours ago

      Right if you had to pick a big bank that didn't die in 2008 but nonetheless should not be followed on anything.. Barclays is top 3 for sure.

      • HFguy · 11 hours ago

        Deutsche Bank is number one this list.

        • steveBK123 · 11 hours ago

          LOL yeah.. I mean.. yeah.

        • master_crab · 11 hours ago

          Yeah, that’s implied

        • weakened_malloc · 5 hours ago

          DB failed upwards. They couldn't fail, they were far more systemically important than Lehman or Bear.

  • octo888 · 11 hours ago

    They've been in business longer than the USA's existence, they must be doing something right - some 336 years. The UK is very good at banking.

    • throwaway2037 · 10 hours ago

      Uhh... colonial empire? See also: HSBC and Standard Chartered. For those unaware, one of France's largest banks, BNP Paribas is also an old colonial bank from... wait for it... Netherlands! Paribas stands for "Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas". For those unaware, the old French term for the Netherlands (Holland) is the low countries, which is literally "Pays-Bas" in French. To be fair, UK's #1 talent and economic advantage for global commerce in 2026 is their contract law and the courts that judicate it. It is unmatched globally. Sure, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hongkong, and Singapore are pretty big, but nothing competes with London for international contract law. The ecosystem is just so massive and concentrated in London -- courts, highly experienced judges/barristers (lawyers)/academics.

      • 1718627440 · 8 hours ago

        > For those unaware, the old French term for the Netherlands (Holland) is the low countries, which is literally "Pays-Bas" in French. "Netherlands" still means "low countries".

        • octo888 · 7 hours ago

          I don't know what it means. I'll be honest, I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore. Scholars maintain that the translation was lost hundreds of years ago

          • 1718627440 · 6 hours ago

            What do you mean by that? https://nl-en.dict.cc/?s=neder https://nl-en.dict.cc/?s=nederig

  • jbs789 · 11 hours ago

    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.

  • schrodinger · 11 hours ago

    Goldman any day, if you're asking based on their respective reputations.

  • piker · 11 hours ago

    Better not ask that question to Merrill Lynch circa 2006

• delis-thumbs-7e · 8 hours ago

  > Barclays is moving in the other direction > Barclays said in October that it expects half its developers to be using Claude Code by the end of the year, and three weeks later named developers among 5,000 job cuts. Like Goldman, it is giving coding agents to engineers. Unlike Goldman, it is also using them to reduce how many engineers it employs. It says nowhere Barclay’s is permitting them to traders, just that they are - like Goldman - permitting them to developers, who they subsequently will be firing enmasse.

> "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.

• bagacrap · 11 hours ago

  I haven't been in this position before. Serious question: are you any better off than if the traders had simply forwarded you the prompt directly?

• ctkhn · 11 hours ago

  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.

• ttul · 11 hours ago

  Someone will build an enterprise thing that takes care of this, and probably make a ton in the process.

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.

• kraken_cult · 11 hours ago

  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.

  • CharlesW · 11 hours ago

    I've been lucky enough to never work with engineers who take offense at rough sketches, specs, or prototypes.

    • dmoy · 10 hours ago

      There's a spectrum, right? On one end of the spectrum you've got presumably you, who brings a sketch or prototype to engineering, and has a reasonable discussion about what can or cannot be made production ready on what timeline, with what budget. On the other end you've got people who bring a half baked prototype to a couple engineers, demand it be in production next week, and then escalate and make a big scene when there's pushback. No engineers tend to complain about the former. The latter is stressful as hell

    • preg_match · 8 hours ago

      It's fine if everyone realizes they are rough sketches, specs, or prototypes. But programmers have hubris, developed through many years of writing shitty code they have to burn to the ground. Other professionals often don't have that hubris. The power of writing code goes straight to their head. Programmers are trying to write the least code possible to do what they need to do, because they know every single line is a liability. A company liability, and a personal liability, because they're the one that will have to fix it when things go wrong. I think people who are not programmers don't always understand that, and they are extra isolated from it because ultimately they don't maintain or fix their stuff. Some other poor soul does, so out of sight out of mind.

    • surajrmal · 6 hours ago

      It requires both sides to play nice. Engineers have to be relaxed about it but the folks asking engineers for things need to accept that it's not as simple as the prototype may make it seem. If there is mutual understanding and respect things go well. If there is any hint of us vs them mentality, it goes sideways.

• verdverm · 11 hours ago

  the take away is that Ai enhances expertise rather than making experts out of everyone or replacing them

• Forgeties79 · 11 hours ago

  > Has nothing to do with AI being bad. Good engineers have a mind for it 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.”

• GolfPopper · 11 hours ago

  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] 1. https://www.the-independent.com/tech/chatgpt-ai-cancer-cure-...

• timcobb · 11 hours ago

  > 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.

• iejeieie · 9 hours ago

  Erm why are you so defensive? There’s plenty of firms out there claiming sales people can create all sorts of productivity apps…

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."

• Scubabear68 · 11 hours ago

  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. At least that stuff had guardrails around it.

  • KellyCriterion · 9 hours ago

    >allowed Traders to put in limited C++ This is gold! :-))

• dgan · 11 hours ago

  i know one who Claude-generated entire fixed income pricing library. he s using it for his daily trades lol. wondering how that will go

  • evantbyrne · 10 hours ago

    If it is just a stateless UI, then probably fine. I've converted a number of these into production apps and the gaps existed in places a non-technical person wouldn't look: the overall architecture, database schema, security, and handling of edge cases to name a few.

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.

• claysmithr · 11 hours ago

  I feel moreso it doesn't trust the users of the product

  • baalimago · 11 hours ago

    If you cannot make your chainsaw safe (enough) to use for the market-share you want, it's not a good chainsaw

    • claysmithr · 10 hours ago

      There are some tools that require training to use and cannot be used by just anybody, like Cranes. they are powerful, but required specialized operators.

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.

• rkuodys · 11 hours ago

  This is scary. With tools that Claude offer it is very easy to cross HIPAA line and accidentally send shitton of data to claude

  • rckoepke · 11 hours ago

    MD is often “Managing Director” when the top level subject refers to Goldman Sachs, et. al. Also AIUI both claude[0] and chatgpt[1] offer HIPAA compliant BAA’s. 0: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13296973-hipaa-ready-... 1: https://openai.com/solutions/industries/healthcare/

    • rkuodys · 10 hours ago

      Ok my bad then. MD I took for medical doctor.

    • leafingensemble · 9 hours ago

      Isn't it crazy that ai companies have private inference but still spy on the consumers. I don't think it's far fetched to say the reason the subscription discounts $1k of API to $200, is that the data is worth $800.

      • rckoepke · 7 hours ago

        I would posit that it’s more about market segmentation than the NPV of training on the data but I don’t have enough insider knowledge to make a statement on that matter.

  • thatfrenchguy · 10 hours ago

    They have ZDR arrangements for this reason

    • anon373839 · 9 hours ago

      Anthropic’s ZDR agreement is a sieve. It has so many conditions that vest Anthropic with discretion over whether they get to retain data.

  • doctoboggan · 8 hours ago

    Do you think my wife is dumb and doesn't take her job seriously? She is very aware of HIPAA rules and makes sure to steer clear.

• afavour · 11 hours ago

  I really hope she’s not using any patient data with it.

  • lacedeconstruct · 11 hours ago

    Oh she is definitely doing that

    • doctoboggan · 8 hours ago

      Do you know my wife? Why do you think she would put her job in jeopardy and patient data at risk? You seem to have a naive view of doctors and their relationship with technology

  • wildzzz · 11 hours ago

    There are already HIPAA-compliant AI systems in place. My doctor uses an AI transcription service for her patient interviews.

    • afavour · 10 hours ago

      For sure but how many have account access set up by the doctor’s spouse?

      • doctoboggan · 8 hours ago

        Where did I say I set up her account access? And how would I get it on her computer? No, I told her to request access to Claude Code through her workplace which she did and was granted.

• ginsider_oaks · 11 hours ago

  who is "he"?

  • danek_szy · 11 hours ago

    Claude most likely...

  • zurfer · 11 hours ago

    From context I assume: Claude. "It" might fit better?

• timcobb · 11 hours ago

  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.

• caymanjim · 10 hours ago

  To those who are replying with surprise and fear: I work in healthcare-adjacent tech. You can use Claude with HIPAA/PHI. You need to sign a BAA (Business Associate Agreement). It dictates how Anthropic may use and how they must safeguard the PHI (Private Health Information), including not training on it. I assure you that Claude and other LLMs are used extensively in healthcare, with PHI access, just about everywhere. Don't be naive. Don't be alarmist. If anything, LLM use under these conditions is far more safe than the way most people use LLMs. Engineers who aren't under any regulatory regime like HIPAA are using LLMs without the BAA safeguards, exposing personal data directly to the insecure, shared models, which are now training on all the personal data that's being fed into them. People think their communication with LLMs is private and isolated, but without the BAAs in use by companies under compliance regimes, it's not isolated.

  • afavour · 10 hours ago

    > Don't be naive. Don't be alarmist. To me it’s the phrasing “I got her using Claude code”. Maybe that means “I helped her set up access through her employer approved AI account” but it’s not exactly that common for such access to be set up by your husband. It just as plausibly means “she’s using the same personal account she’s using for the family tasks I also mentioned”. I don’t see that concern as naive so much as in tune with the way people frequently use tech.

  • doctoboggan · 8 hours ago

    Thank you, I am taken aback by the crazy reaction here. People assume doctors are some sort of tech illiterate luddites who would be throwing around PII left and right if they weren't restrained by us smart programmers? She takes HIPAA very seriously, and yes she got Claude Code access through her workplace. I did not set up my personal CC account on her work computer and there is no way she would let me (or her corporate controls even if she did...)

• jameson · 10 hours ago

  > Claude is writing code to accomplish the tasks she asks for Is this typical behavior with LLMs not just Claude, but you can discourage from doing so by explicitly stating not to use tool or only use knowledge either in the system prompt or user prompt. LLMs are trained to use tool if they can't solve a problem rather than guessing/hallucinating. A dumb example is asking to count. As the range grow it'll attempt to write a script or use commands like seq to generate the numbers.

• arcanemachiner · 10 hours ago

  By MD, you surely mean Medicinae Doctor, a.k.a Doctor of Medicine, right? If it's some other corpo-acronym, I would hope you would define the term before unleashing it on us normies.

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.

• HolyLampshade · 10 hours ago

  It could also be as simple as the technology adjacent people developing tools via LLM that somehow end up in the critical path of some business function and now it needs to be supported by someone. I’ve seen the same happen with insane spreadsheets. As empowering as something like Claude code can be, leaving development to developers means the output is inherently supported by the organization long term.

  • HolyLampshade · 10 hours ago

    Extending the thought, there’s also the risk it enters critical path but something upstream changes or Anthropic starts charging 1000x for the tokens and now someone needs to walk through god knows how many lines of never before reviewed code to figure out how it works. By wholly depending on the assisted coding you are wholly dependent on Anthropic, forever, for something that is now critical. There are probably thousands of these little microscopic dependencies that occur when you make these tools widely available. What happens when you don’t want to foot the bill anymore?

    • phantompeace · 10 hours ago

      You use OpenAI or Deepseek in that case.

      • HolyLampshade · 8 hours ago

        Capture is capture though. It’s not a matter of which AI provider you use. It’s a matter of losing agency over how an aspect of your business works. Like going 100% into a single cloud provider. Or 100% into MSFT products. There’s legitimate friction in decoupling.

  • specialp · 10 hours ago

    This is what happens. We had this happen with end user scripting pre AI where these scripts became unknown production applications. It made the actual engineering impossible because you had no idea if anything you changed would impact the ??? processes run by users that have become critical. AI would amplify that greatly so we have an explicit rule that it can only be used for reporting and prototyping only and we restrict any write action

• adolph · 10 hours ago

  Maybe there is an irony in that LLM with coding harness could be a step in the right direction for operational domain experts to solve business problems while maintaining high standards for legal/compliance/regulatory/reputational and prd-deployment concerns. User scripts that turn into applications that need production support are often consequential and business-differentiating since they do the things that can't be bought off the shelf and effectively encode tacit knowledge.

• jmathai · 10 hours ago

  I am co-teaching an AI course for college business students. We decided to use Claude Code and Visual Studio since the space is moving so quickly and we thought understanding some of the fundamentals is the most value they could get from the course. It was the right choice. But many of the rough edges of the terminal do surface and confuse non technical people.

  • celiacFun · 8 hours ago

    Isn’t that a good thing? It would be irresponsible to introduce non-technical students to building software without at least covering some basics like a terminal and encouraging some understanding of the limits of their capabilities.

• William_BB · 10 hours ago

  > which leads to the actual problem I think. Getting there faster with less knowledge of coding isn't the problem. Pre LLMs, the main barrier to producing software for non-tech people was writing the code, literally. With LLMs, this barrier is now gone. This results in a much larger volume of slop than before. And then the real barrier shows up -- understanding, fool-proofing and maintaining that code. Code is cheap, show me how it runs in prod. Like it's great that quants can iterate on their ideas much faster now. But GS is saying they shouldn't leave their sandbox.

  • steveBK123 · 10 hours ago

    > But GS is saying they shouldn't leave their sandbox. Exactly

  • Foobar8568 · 10 hours ago

    Elephant in the room is QA, the thing that disappeared when Agile took over the world.

    • HolyLampshade · 5 hours ago

      As much as I agree I think the leading comment is actually even more spot on. Understanding dies on the hill of having a tool build out the process for you, and not understanding, especially in a space as knowledge critical as finance/trading, is where you run into catastrophic levels of risk.

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.

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?

• hackernewds · 11 hours ago

  this is an extremely interesting point

• pdpi · 10 hours ago

  In an honest, well-functioning org, those are decisions made by completely different groups that do not (and should not) report to each other. It's actually kind of depressing that we (and I include myself in that) assume otherwise by default.

  • aljgz · 10 hours ago

    I have bad news: most large corporations are successful because they know how to make money. Often, the internal operations, are disappointingly bad, just not bad enough to kill the corp fast. Source: I've worked in and with many successful organizations, and worked at one place with proper internal processes, so I know what's possible

    • maxnevermind · 10 hours ago

      I have observed that also. Though I'm still not sure whether: 1) there are some small pockets where important decisions are made, innovation happens and the needle is moved, and dysfunction I see is just justified bloat of the company 2) it is the entire corporation like that but it somehow works at the end.

      • eddythompson80 · 6 hours ago

        The way I would describe large companies is similar to that joke "Mandatory scheduled fun events" just with innovation. Most large organizations cannot innovate, instead they execute well. Look at all the major large organizations, they primarily distinguish themselves on execution, not innovation. A startup that's hobbled together by passionate soft drink makers (or whatever) aren't gonna come close to full business efficiency of Coke Inc. The manufacturing capacity, distribution channels, the logistics, the brand management and awareness, the brand integration and cross promotion, and other things that come from economy of scale. The rigid structure is not a place for innovation to grow.

    • freejazz · 8 hours ago

      >I have bad news: most large corporations are successful because they know how to make money. Who is they? Do you have any idea what its like working at an org the size of GS, that you actually think these two completely different departments discussed the matter with each other?

  • mmooss · 10 hours ago

    > In an honest, well-functioning org, those are decisions made by completely different groups that do not (and should not) report to each other. I don't agree at all. Different groups should be supporting each other and the overall bottom line instead of their parochial, narrow self-interests - the latter is a poorly functioning org. If by group A delaying its $100M cost-cutting, group B can add $1B to the bottom line, it would be a corporate and group management failure for group A not to cooperate.

  • trvz · 10 hours ago

    In this case, both decisions are weighty enough that they should be made at the very top, by the same people.

    • freejazz · 8 hours ago

      Really? You think executives at GS waste their time debating where software should be installed on trading desk computers? They have entire departments dedicated to handling those issues...

      • sgt101 · 8 hours ago

        I think that if this wasn't sanctioned by someone at the top then there would be a round of public hanging, drawings and quarterings in the IT department. What is the Investment Bank version of "flogging round the fleet"?

  • piker · 10 hours ago

    I'm no longer in that industry, but as I recall there are actually rules imposing independence from investment banking and research arms, for example. Dates back to the Dot Com era where research analysts were touting IPOs for the investment banking division.

    • oblio · 7 hours ago

      Fairly sure they tore those down last year or a bit before.

• rglover · 10 hours ago

  Plausible deniability.

• jayd16 · 10 hours ago

  Probably easier to bury it in election cycle news and current downturn than worry about it closer to the IPO, no?

• badgersnake · 10 hours ago

  Strats still have access. They probably want the traders to focus on trading and then strats to do this stuff. YTMYTS.

• yipinwong · 10 hours ago

  Conflict of interest? Might as well cover their ass before IPO to claim the underwriting was fair

• lg5689 · 10 hours ago

  At a large bank like this, the people responsible for cybersecurity have a completely separate reporting chain and incentives than the ibanking side. If there was a security risk identified, it'd be completely inappropriate to wait a few weeks.

  • etiennebausson · 9 hours ago

    Because it would be surprising for GS to make inappropriate choices? Google put 'scandal' in the autocomplete choices after their name, that tell me enough.

    • freejazz · 8 hours ago

      Tired of this kind of discussion here. It's so insubstantial. Do you have an actual point to make? I'm sure everyone here is aware that an investment bank the size of GS has been involved in scandal.

    • lg5689 · 7 hours ago

      Large banks are far more conservative about these risks than the media portrays. Reputation and regulation are huge, if not existential, risks, and the senior management treats it this way.

• ericbarrett · 10 hours ago

  This wasn't announced, it was an internal leak reported by Bloomberg. Perhaps they should have known it would leak, but there doesn't seem to be any grand strategy.

• sgt101 · 8 hours ago

  Goldman wants to lead the IPO, and have a successful IPO, because Anthropic and Anthropics investors will give Goldman more business if it does that. However, if Anthropic is overvaluing itself then Goldman may not be filling the book on the offer. This story may drive down the value that investors give to Goldman when it does its research, enabling a lower price on the IPO which will then generate more institutional interest and make the IPO a success.

• kogasa240p · 8 hours ago

  A drug dealer never consumes.

  • dataviz1000 · 8 hours ago

    > A drug dealer never consumes That is: > Number four, I know you heard this before > Never get high on your own supply Nonetheless, I think the advice being applied here is number 3 > Number three, never trust nobody

Funny how David Solomon used ai for his Wharton School MBA graduation speech, but now is banning it at his company.

At our org they have been clawing back Claude access because of chronic billing overages. Budgets are tight and consumption billing models are being stamped down on everywhere. Anthropic sales can not offer us any sort of normalized billing rate. Gemini is swooping in because they offer flat consistent billing and handle overages through throttling access to higher models. For 90% of the non-engineering org the experience is near enough it makes no difference.

• ipdashc · 10 hours ago

  > because of chronic billing overages I don't get how this is such a common issue. Are companies paying API rates for devs? The $20/mo plan pretty much works fine for most people at my company

  • MisterMunchkin · 10 hours ago

    You aren’t allowed to use the flat rates for companies, unless you’re cheating them they’ll come for you eventuallt

    • 80fj0348i · 10 hours ago

      You can use the Claude Team plan up to 150 seats.

    • Toutouxc · 9 hours ago

      Last time I checked (a few months ago) it was fine for a company to pay for regular Max/Ultra accounts (not even the per-seat ones). Is it different now?

  • brd529 · 10 hours ago

    Anthropic forces you onto api billing for orgs above a certain size

  • ctxc · 10 hours ago

    I thought enterprise contracts (ie teams with >x users) offered only API prices. Am I wrong?

  • 80fj0348i · 10 hours ago

    Yes, in industries where you have legal/regulatory/security restrictions on your data, you pretty much have to pay API rates. Furthermore, if you buy through providers like AWS Bedrock or GCP Whatever-The-Fuck-They-Renamed-Vertex-To, depending on your setup you may not benefit from the pricing on cached tokens. It can anywhere from 10x to 100x the prices you pay.

  • daveoc64 · 10 hours ago

    Subscription plans are limited to companies with fewer than 150 users. Anything above that requires an Enterprise plan, which is billed at API rates.

    • kshacker · 10 hours ago

      I work for a company that pays by API. But I wonder whether the cost shown to us is what the company actually pays? Pretty sure finance would have written a discount which is not shown to employees to keep us in check. My hearts says that's what going on but ... does someone know?

      • lycan1917 · 10 hours ago

        The actual cost your company pays is likely _higher_ than what Claude Code shows in /cost, not lower. Also, very few organizations are getting any discount on API rates. Maybe the US military.

      • daemonologist · 9 hours ago

        I've seen the bill at our company (few hundred users, few thousand total employees); we're paying the full API rate.

      • simonw · 9 hours ago

        I looked into this the other day - it's hard to get concrete numbers but rumors online lead me to believe that negotiated discounts tend to only be in the 10-15% range and you need to commit to six figure of spending to get them.

      • driverdan · 6 hours ago

        In my experience Anthropic won't give you much of a discount, if any, unless you have a multi-million dollar a year contract.

    • ReptileMan · 9 hours ago

      What exactly prevents a person signing in personally for a plan and just getting reimbursed by the company?

      • bashtoni · 9 hours ago

        Data protection guarantees. This is especially true if you need zero data retention, which isn't available on individual subscriptions.

      • numbsafari · 9 hours ago

        Basic security and governance? IP and trade secret protection?

      • krawat3 · 9 hours ago

        There’s so many reasons. First off, I cannot just download and install arbitrary software on my work machine. It would also never get approved due to governance and compliance reasons, data protection and the fact that I would be using a personal license for work projects. I believe this would violate not only my employment contract but also Claude ToS.

        • quasarj · 5 hours ago

          I could never work somewhere that my work machine was locked down like that. I guess it's good I won't have to worry about ever being employed again, soon lol

          • guiambros · 2 hours ago

            > "I could never work somewhere that my work machine was locked down like that." I heard Binance is hiring.

          • AlotOfReading · 2 hours ago

            I don't know where you could work that this policy isn't at least nominally in force, outside very small companies. Common certifications like ISO:27001 and SOC2 basically require systems to be running only "authorized" software. It usually isn't actively enforced on developers, but IME virtually all companies have it as an official policy alongside a rarely used process to get approval for unauthorized applications.

        • edg5000 · 2 hours ago

          It's so odd. Never before have I seen an example where small companies have such an insane benefit over large ones. (because of the insane rates large orgs need to pay for AI).

      • freejazz · 9 hours ago

        Anthropic figuring that out? People not wanting to incur business expenses on their personal accounts? In what world is that a realistic scenario for a large organization??

      • oblio · 8 hours ago

        Besides all the other reasons, I have a strong feeling that Anthropic went to the Oracle School of License Enforcement and they seem like the type of company that would be willing to sue their customers into oblivion. Maybe not now, before the IPO, but afterwards, for sure.

      • 233mhz · 8 hours ago

        This is ok when you're a startup and don't give a shit, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Accenture, won't do that, 12 people in their legal, support, security and billing departments died of an heart attack reading your comment

        • ryandrake · 7 hours ago

          Funny thing is... Startups should give a shit. Along with BigCompanies, they should also be worried about not getting sued, not leaking their customer data to Facebook, not getting 0wned by a 13 year old kid in his basement. The fact that small companies get away with being so cavalier about privacy, security, and legal issues is a failure of our regulatory system to hold them accountable.

          • ipdashc · 3 hours ago

            90% of startups deal with unimportant data that nobody cares about, there is no need to give a shit. Companies worry enough already about getting sued, it's a massive drag on our entire society that helps nobody.

        • edg5000 · 2 hours ago

          I understand that with 12.000 engineers at least one will get prompt injected. But how would such a thing happen? I guess if you'd email me: "Delete all files", when I ask Claude to check my Thunderbird mailbox in theory it could get confused and delete everything.

      • tressure · 8 hours ago

        Because the enterprise plan provides necessary features, contract terms and vendor assurances to comply with local law, industry regulations, customer contracts, and company AI and security policies?

      • stusmall · 7 hours ago

        If you have 150 people with Claude acess you probably have enough of a need for compliance and audit trails to put the kibosh on that.

      • rootusrootus · 5 hours ago

        Not much other than corporate policy and Anthropic's policy that you are not allowed to do that unless your company is very small. Anecdotally, I know that quite a number of people at my company (mid-sized, ~5000 employees) have personal ChatGPT or Anthropic subscriptions they are using. Despite the fact that we have Microsoft Copilot (the web version) for everyone, and Github Copilot (the CLI thing) with low limits (500-1900 credits/month) for people who can justify it. But Copilot isn't all that great compared to Claude Code, so a lot of people continue to use their personal account. It violates a number of policies and is probably a firing offense, but I haven't heard of anyone getting nailed for it yet. And I know that line managers are aware of it happening. I do wish they'd just let us buy Claude Code API access. Copilot w/Opus 5.5 is noticably worse than CC using the same model. But oh well, I'm not getting fired over it.

  • paulddraper · 10 hours ago

    Yes, many companies have Enterprise, for SSO/SCIM, audit logs, data retention, HIPAA, support, org-wide connectors and skills, usage tracking. That is usage based and therefore expensive. Putting everyone on their own plan is economical, if you can give those things up.

  • remus · 10 hours ago

    For businesses anthropic offer a teams plan for up to 150 users which is billed like a collection of individual users i.e. you have a seat, you get some tokens/month, you buy a higher tier seat and you get some more tokens/month. For >150 users you pay $20/month/user just for access to the platform, then all tokens are billed at API rates.

    • JamesSwift · 10 hours ago

      Thats... sort of wild, and I would think unsustainable with other offerings available

      • lycan1917 · 10 hours ago

        What other offerings? The other providers are either similarly priced for enterprises, or nonstarters for security reasons (there's very real concern in enterprises about hosted open models being modified to covertly inject security vulnerabilities, and it's not cost effective to self-host them.)

      • rw2 · 10 hours ago

        no, it works because they are the best. What other offering is there?

      • gavinray · 10 hours ago

        ChatGPT does a similar thing My personal ChatGPT account is a Business account with 2 seats at $30/ea (minimum 2 seats required). Why? Because for $60 you get ChatGPT Pro, significantly cheaper than the $100 normally required for the next level personal plan!

        • Doohickey-d · 9 hours ago

          Is that some sort of legacy pricing? because on https://chatgpt.com/pricing/?type=team I see an option of either £15/ month or £75/ month, per seat, 2 seats required. So it's more expensive than a single £89/ month pro subscription.

          • gavinray · 8 hours ago

            How is 2 x 15 more expensive than 89?

            • edg5000 · 2 hours ago

              The 2 x 15 gets you the permission to use Claude at API rates, it comes with no or minimal usage.

      • swatcoder · 10 hours ago

        No, that's the whole business model -- the subscription plans are a teaser with mixed-to-low profitability, but they're self-serve, have low support demand, and create a breadth of familiarity and brand attachment. It's a genuinely good deal for individuals and small businesses but represent a subsidized marketing program for Anthropic and OpenAI. Enterprise sales are where the revenue for the $1T valuations comes from. If they were forced by competition to offer subscriptions to all those organizations, they'd blow up tomorrow.

  • dcre · 10 hours ago

    Enterprise plans are billed at API rates, with small discounts only if you’re quite big.

  • cvadict · 10 hours ago

    > The $20/mo plan ... Is just the first hit your dealer gives away for free. Treating that as the actual baseline cost for what they need in order to justify current AI valuations requires some truly fraudulent mathematics. Hell, even the current API rates are unsustainable -as-long-as- they need to keep investing into training the next model they will be serving 6 months from now. The plan has always been to develop these models using borrowed money, get everyone's business process addicted to them, moat off access to alternatives (e.g. chinese / foreign open-weight models), via technical superiority -or- more likely regulatory shenanigans, THEN jack the prices up through the roof starting with direct enterprise customers buying API access but then obviously bubbling down into literally every product / service every human being on this planet purchases. Unfortunately, it's a garbage plan based on a multi-ton house of cards that is about to collapse on everyone.

  • SequoiaHope · 10 hours ago

    Hah I can’t imagine only using a $20/mo plan. (Robotics engineer)

    • DaSHacka · 10 hours ago

      I honestly can't imagine using a bigger plan. The $20 a month plan is able to be used almost all day without hitting the usage quota so long as you moderate what model you're using. I really don't understand why so many people seemingly use the bigger plans. Are people just running opus 5.5 as 4+ subagents 24/7? In order for me to actually understand what's being done, I always keep it brief and use specific prompts (and usually use smaller models since they're perfect for that). Do people just let "claude take the wheel"? When you have to go in to your next standup and explain what your code does to your boss, and what you've done since the last meeting, what do you say?

      • visarga · 10 hours ago

        I run 4 agents under one supervisor agent for 12 hours a day building computer use environments. Yes, I don't read the code, but testing is 90% of my work. Got to find other ways to buy trust in AI code. I came up with a stack of 5 layers of testing which is pretty similar to the recent Anthropic writeup. I can consume the $100/mo plan weekly quota in 2 days.

      • teaearlgraycold · 10 hours ago

        I let Claude take the wheel with various non-professional projects which often means heavy subagent workflows. Prompts like this easily eat through my 5x Max plan limits: > I want you to look for UI issues related to transitions. Look for jumps, reverts, or anything that doesn't follow UI/UX best practices. You might need to figure out how best to even record and review UI transitions. Do all testing locally on a local dev server, but make sure to undo any database changes you make in the process of testing. Be exhaustive and report back with an .html report that highlights the visual issues and proposed solutions so I can review each one. Ultracode on. Which means I have up to 10 Opus 5.5 medium agents running concurrently for long stretches of time. I want to be clear I don't think that using Claude in this way gets you the best possible results. But when the app is fully vibecoded then audit prompts like the one above can be seen as a definite net positive. Making Claude think really hard about various improvement routines will get you better results in that one aspect than Claude's first attempt to build something from scratch did.

      • lycan1917 · 9 hours ago

        > When you have to go in to your next standup and explain what your code does to your boss, and what you've done since the last meeting, what do you say? I hand them a writeup of how incorporating agentic decision making into cleaning up some of our messy data saved us $XXX,XXX at a cost of $XX of tokens, with the receipts attached.

      • KellyCriterion · 9 hours ago

        How do you get along with the 20USD plan and that much utilization? I use Claude mainly via Webinterface and when on Opus 4.8 or higher, I reach my weakly limit around 2 - 3 days before rest - and Im just prompting single/specific very limited & constrained classes & functions with proper description and architecture upfront.

        • 80fj0348i · 8 hours ago

          The Claude Code CLI is far more efficient at many tasks than the web interface or the desktop app.

      • not_kurt_godel · 9 hours ago

        > When you have to go in to your next standup and explain what your code does to your boss, and what you've done since the last meeting, what do you say? You say the same thing to your boss as if you were a lead or manager reporting on a project that your junior and mid-level devs are working on. "What" is the easy part to explain; "how" is the details that your manager doesn't need to hear about if you're doing your job properly.

      • AshamedBadger56 · 7 hours ago

        > Do people just let "claude take the wheel"? Yes, I'd wager most people just let "claude take the wheel". > When you have to go in to your next standup and explain what your code does to your boss, and what you've done since the last meeting, what do you say? You say "Claude, I've got a standup in 10 min, give me a high level summary for my boss of everything you did since the last standup" and then you read that lol.

      • edg5000 · 2 hours ago

        Example of token-heavy jobs: - PCB layout. Last job took 8 hours unsupervised. - CAD design. Less heavy, but still heavy. Coding is lightweight for an LLM, depending on how complicated testing is.

    • ern · 7 hours ago

      Claude Team has higher usage than the Claude Pro plan for individuals ( https://claude.com/pricing#team-&-enterprise ).

    • bonoboTP · 5 hours ago

      The 200 dollar plan weekly limit runs out in like half a day or a day if you use it heavily with subagents. The 20 dollar plan is a blip. You can build a lot of stuff this way. You can also waste it. You need good people who will use it well and usefully.

      • Seattle3503 · 5 hours ago

        What are you doing with your subagents? I find that as long as I use Opus at the top level and Sonnet/Haiku for subagents I generally don't run into usage limits.

        • bonoboTP · 4 hours ago

          We never risk using Sonnet or Haiku. Too many mistakes. The cost is worth it to always use Opus 5.5 even in the subagents.

  • khuey · 10 hours ago

    Yes, any decent size business is paying API rates.

  • habosa · 8 hours ago

    Those personal plans are hard to manage. As an administrator I can't control settings across the org if everyone is on their own plan which means people may be giving sensitive code/data away to Anthropic or sketchy connectors without my knowledge. So most businesses at least use the Anthropic Team plan, which is $25 or $125 but isn't as generous as the personal max plans. Overage is API rates. Almost all of our devs are over the allotment most months.

    • edg5000 · 2 hours ago

      Team or not, data still goes to Anthropic. Whatever data the employees have access to, you can assume it goes to Anthropic. Although the connectors do add to that. I'd limit what the employees can access to limit what goes to Anthropic.

  • Echo4309 · 8 hours ago

    The enterprise cost controls that Anthropic offer are blunt, really only allowing for allow/disable specific models and a general monthly hard cap per user. No per-model spend allowance. Their "reduced cost" mode is just Sonnet on Low with no flexibility. They are frankly reaping what they sow here, enterprises have been very clear about what controls would help us align costs, but they have been very poor at shipping features on that front.

  • oliyoung · 8 hours ago

    At the enterprise level, API billing is post-paid, and a lagging indicator on an unlimited expensive resource with bureaucracy between service owner and end user is a recipe for disaster

  • iamjake648 · 2 hours ago

    Most folks I know have companies that deploy the models via Bedrock or Azure foundry and the token cost goes against their spend with those vendors.

• cr125rider · 10 hours ago

  Consumption billing? Claude code is primarily a subscription. A heavily subsidized one at that. How are you doing it so wrong?