Goldman Sachs is pulling Claude Code from its bankers and traders

MallocVoidstar

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.

CharlieDigital

> 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".

Ericson2314

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!

amelius

> Barclays is moving in the other direction Just fyi.

cloudednine

> "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.

aurareturn

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.

hn_go_brrrrr

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."

baalimago

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.

doctoboggan

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.

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.

clickety_clack

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.

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?

nickandbro

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

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.

cco

Claude writes code just fine, and can create shareable "artifacts" that may have full backends, databases etc. Claude Code is a poor fit for non-engineers, it carries a lot of features, vernacular, and patterns that don't make sense to people that don't code. So I don't think this means much? All of the coding functionality a non-engineer could want is still available, just no need to switch to a different tab in the Claude app (or even worse the terminal).

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.

throwaway2037

I never understand why Goldman Sachs gets so much attention for their technology. Their tech stack for front office (sales, trading, quants) is utter shit -- Slang is like a closed-source poor man's Python, and SecDB (their database) has no SQL interface -- only key-value pair (like a NoSQL database). The tech stack at JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley is light years ahead. My only explanation: The Goldman PR team is unbeatable. I assume that they are sometimes paying/bribing media to run stories. To be fair, Goldman's risk taking is excellent, but their tech stack in 2026 is so mediocre.

ForgotMyUUID

Instead of reading I spent time studying those traders with both hands left! Ironically they are obviously the ones who need claude the most.

bilekas

> Why a coding agent is riskier on a trading desk If you need to ask, maybe you shouldn't hand it over to non tech, high risk individuals just yet.

123a-ahhg

Programmers are still allowed. It is curious that GS sued an engineer leaking source code to a competitor in 2009 when they now voluntarily give up their entire source code to Anthropic. Apparently they finally got the memo that leaking corporate secrets for at least traders and bankers is unwise.