209 points TheWiggles 1 hour ago 131 comments

MallocVoidstar 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

CharlieDigital 1 hour ago | parent

    > 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

reactordev 59 minutes ago | parent

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

Ericson2314 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 59 minutes ago | parent

we are all growing the same thing (internally)

Ericson2314 55 minutes ago | parent

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 55 minutes ago | parent

> design the programming environment for the bankers so they cannot hurt themselves

Sounds like the web platform.

neya 55 minutes ago | parent

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 51 minutes ago | parent

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 54 minutes ago | parent

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 46 minutes ago | parent

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 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

steveBK123 37 minutes ago | parent

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 32 minutes ago | parent

> 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 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

risyachka 36 minutes ago | parent

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 28 minutes ago | parent

> 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 27 minutes ago | parent

Anthropic and OpenAI can’t design secure programming environments.

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

> Barclays is moving in the other direction

Just fyi.

steveBK123 59 minutes ago | parent

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

sourdecor 57 minutes ago | parent

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 47 minutes ago | parent

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 55 minutes ago | parent

Maybe not Goldman.

But DEFINITELY NOT Barclays.

steveBK123 51 minutes ago | parent

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 40 minutes ago | parent

Deutsche Bank is number one this list.

steveBK123 37 minutes ago | parent

LOL yeah.. I mean.. yeah.

master_crab 36 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, that’s implied

octo888 51 minutes ago | parent

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 33 minutes ago | parent

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.

jbs789 50 minutes ago | parent

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 46 minutes ago | parent

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

piker 38 minutes ago | parent

Better not ask that question to Merrill Lynch circa 2006

cloudednine 1 hour ago | parent

> "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 54 minutes ago | parent

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 51 minutes ago | parent

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 38 minutes ago | parent

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

aurareturn 1 hour ago | parent

  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 1 hour ago | parent

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 56 minutes ago | parent

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

verdverm 52 minutes ago | parent

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

Forgeties79 50 minutes ago | parent

> 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 42 minutes ago | parent

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 36 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

hn_go_brrrrr 1 hour ago | parent

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 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

dgan 46 minutes ago | parent

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 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

baalimago 58 minutes ago | parent

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 53 minutes ago | parent

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

baalimago 49 minutes ago | parent

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

claysmithr 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

doctoboggan 52 minutes ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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 35 minutes ago | parent

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 8 minutes ago | parent

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

thatfrenchguy 26 minutes ago | parent

They have ZDR arrangements for this reason

afavour 46 minutes ago | parent

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

lacedeconstruct 43 minutes ago | parent

Oh she is definitely doing that

wildzzz 37 minutes ago | parent

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

afavour 17 minutes ago | parent

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

ginsider_oaks 42 minutes ago | parent

who is "he"?

danek_szy 39 minutes ago | parent

Claude most likely...

zurfer 38 minutes ago | parent

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

timcobb 39 minutes ago | parent

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 32 minutes ago | parent

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 19 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

jameson 24 minutes ago | parent

> 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 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

steveBK123 52 minutes ago | parent

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 32 minutes ago | parent

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 26 minutes ago | parent

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 11 minutes ago | parent

You use OpenAI or Deepseek in that case.

adolph 28 minutes ago | parent

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 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

clickety_clack 46 minutes ago | parent

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 39 minutes ago | parent

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 37 minutes ago | parent

this is an extremely interesting point

pdpi 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

lukan 30 minutes ago | parent

And in a well functioning world, no child would die of hunger or bombs and we would not have a climate crisis (political leaders are in denial about). But this is the reality we have to deal with.

epistasis 29 minutes ago | parent

A well functioning org happens regularly. A well-functioning world is far more difficult.

DrudgeCorporate 26 minutes ago | parent

Kind of an odd strawman

otterley 25 minutes ago | parent

What was the point of this comment?

arcanemachiner 23 minutes ago | parent

Tinfoil hattery

markerz 16 minutes ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

Also what’s your point? Goldman Sachs shouldn’t pull Claude Code because there’s no point in trying in this world and we should all give up on everything?

aljgz 21 minutes ago | parent

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

rglover 33 minutes ago | parent

Plausible deniability.

jayd16 23 minutes ago | parent

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

badgersnake 20 minutes ago | parent

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

yipinwong 17 minutes ago | parent

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

nickandbro 37 minutes ago | parent

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

legitster 35 minutes ago | parent

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 31 minutes ago | parent

> 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 28 minutes ago | parent

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

80fj0348i 25 minutes ago | parent

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

brd529 26 minutes ago | parent

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

ctxc 26 minutes ago | parent

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

80fj0348i 26 minutes ago | parent

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 25 minutes ago | parent

Subscription plans are limited to companies with fewer than 150 users.

Anything above that requires an Enterprise plan, which is billed at API rates.

paulddraper 23 minutes ago | parent

Yes, many companies have Enterprise —- SSO/SCIM, audit logs, data retention, HIPAA, support, org-wide connectors and skills, usage tracking.

That is usage based and therefore expensive.

Putting everyone in their own plan is economical, if you can give those things up.

remus 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

dcre 6 minutes ago | parent

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

cvadict 5 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

cr125rider 30 minutes ago | parent

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

bakies 24 minutes ago | parent

Companies this size don't get the subsidy

80fj0348i 24 minutes ago | parent

Anthropic does not sell subscriptions to organizations over 150 people, only API billing.

cco 31 minutes ago | parent

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).

sky2224 18 minutes ago | parent

A reasoning cited in the article is that there was no source control in place for the trade tooling that Goldman Sachs finance employees were building.

I'm guessing that + probably the absence of any deployment infrastructure for the finance people to be forced to use made Goldman Sachs' eyes widen and pull the plug immediately before something blows up (if it hasn't already internally).

I also wonder if a lack of diligence with Claude Code (or any LLM tool for that matter) resulted in private information getting leaked, and that feedback is just now getting back to them.

In terms of the big picture of the industry and the AI bubble though, yeah this isn't too big of a deal.

armanckeser 30 minutes ago | parent

> 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 29 minutes ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

> 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 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

microflash 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

anonymous908213 7 minutes ago | parent

Excel macros are deterministic, don't leak BI and PII, aren't malware, and don't cost an extra engineer's salary per engineer. Comparing them to Claude is quite a disservice.

kittikitti 21 minutes ago | parent

I'm not surprised in the slightest. Claude Code is a proprietary mess that only serves Anthropic, not any of the people using it. In a financial setting, I've had disastrous results with it. This is a good move Goldman Sachs, and I think everyone will be happy it happened.

eqmvii 18 minutes ago | parent

Every company is struggling with the right balance right now. All the more impossible as the quality of the tools changes so dramatically every quarter.

shevy-java 16 minutes ago | parent

The anti-AI movement is gaining grounds every day! \o/

AI skynet has not yet won.

fancyfredbot 4 minutes ago | parent

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 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.