Goldman Sachs Bars Traders and Bankers From Claude Code
Goldman Sachs Is Pulling Claude Code from Its Bankers and Traders
Goldman Sachs has restricted Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub to its roughly 12,000 engineers, cutting off traders and bankers who used the tools to track client flows and build market models. The October guidance follows a review of productivity and risk, and it lands awkwardly: Goldman is a lead underwriter on Anthropic's IPO, and its CIO had praised trader-built AI tools just months earlier. The bank had already pulled Claude from Hong Kong bankers in April.
Over the next few weeks, Goldman's bankers will be marketing shares in a company whose coding agent most of them are no longer allowed to use.
- lukebuehler
People are giving all kinds of explanations here why Goldman is doing this, but they are not addressing what the article (implicitly) says: operating coding agents on the primary machines of finance professionals runs directly into the lethal trifecta. It's as simple as that.
You cannot have semi-unattended agents running on the same workstations that have access to client/trade/prop information and email client, and internet, and internal networks, it's too dangerous--a major leak is just one small mistake or prompt injection away. Banks are not stupid, they are getting it and shutting it down.
- legitster
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.
- steveBK123
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.
- cactca
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?
- fancyfredbot
Goldman is very unlikely to have decided proactively to cut off traders access, and it's much more likely there was an operational loss. What kind of loss? I don't know but consider:
1) Claude Code is only being taken away from traders.
2) Only traders have permission to send orders to the market and book client trades.
3) Claude code would probably have been running as the trader, under their account with minimal review.
If you run a coding agent in that environment it's only a matter of time until it enters a bad order or books a bad trade, and once that happens it's only a matter of time before management decides to take this kind of action.
Goldman is definitely not doing this for cost reasons. They can afford the tokens.
- armanckeser
> The Hong Kong restriction was based on location and contract terms, and the new one is based on role. 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.
- microflash
As the things stand, we used to have thousands of Excels with obscure macros heavy-lifting businesses. Now we have thousands of Claude artifacts doing the same. Nothing has changed, much less improved.
Wherever I've seen a pull back, it is all because of compliance or security. And that too not because of the purity of heart; but because some checkbox couldn't be ticked due to AI.
- wildmXranat
I have mentioned this a couple months ago to a higher up. I do not feel it is safe and prudent to let codex loose with full root access, network access and remote access to other LAN connected machines.
Not to mention it having access to any files and binaries which may expose credentials or setup which may lead to credential leak via hsm access.
I was simply told to bring it up to an another manager for a "second opinion", but I'm not sure if this even a good way to approach it. Security by committee is an abysmal trap and a way for deferred liability.
- radial_symmetry
They should use something like Synthetiq to let the traders build apps but keep it in a managed environment with observability and policy enforcement
- mikidi
This just means Claude Code on their bankers/traders laptop is not ok, they will buy managed agents and similar products for non-engineers. Sound like high margin products to me.