Anthropic unveils AI agents to field financial services tasks

[SAN FRANCISCO] Anthropic PBC unveiled a set of new artificial intelligence agents designed to handle a broader mix of financial services tasks, part of the company’s push to win over Wall Street.

The Claude maker is releasing AI agents that it says can draft pitch decks for client meetings, review financial statements and escalate cases for compliance review. The new tools – 10 in total – are aimed at professionals across banking, insurance, asset management and financial technology. FactSet Research Systems shares fell as much as 8.1 per cent after the announcement, while Morningstar erased earlier gains to fall more than 3 per cent. Shares of S&P Global and Moody’s both saw sharp selling pressure as well.

Anthropic has established itself as a leader in the lucrative market for AI coding tools that streamline the process of software development. Increasingly, the firm is now competing against rival OpenAI to prove its technology can handle a wide range of valuable tasks in other industries, including finance, as the two startups look to bolster revenue ahead of their widely expected initial public offerings.

“Finance is a great blueprint for the rest of knowledge work,” said Nicholas Lin, Anthropic’s head of product for financial services. Lin added that financial uses of AI are “just a few months behind” the technology’s coding applications, which we have seen massive acceleration in.

“In a sign of the company’s growing influence beyond Silicon Valley, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei spoke about AI on Tuesday alongside JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon at an Anthropic event in New York attended by banking industry leaders.

The technology is advancing rapidly, but Amodei said businesses typically do not move as fast. “Our ability to commercialise this technology, to gain revenue for this technology, is held back not by the power of the models and the economic value it can generate in principle, but that sort of diffusion through the world,” he said.

Anthropic now has more than 300,000 business customers who use its technologies to automate parts of their work. In February, Anthropic introduced plug-ins for its Claude software tailored for financial analysis, equity research, private equity and wealth management. It also debuted a new model that month that it said was more adept at financial research.

As part of the new offerings announced on Tuesday, Anthropic said that it is also enabling its Claude AI model to work better across third-party software such as Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and to integrate data from partners in the financial services industry, such as Dun & Bradstreet and Moody’s.

Anthropic is also deepening its ties in the financial industry through a new joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs. The venture will work to deploy Anthropic’s software to more businesses. OpenAI has finalised plans for a similar company.

Anthropic has begun weighing a fresh funding round that could value the firm at over US$900 billion, Bloomberg has reported, potentially leapfrogging OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup. Like OpenAI, Anthropic has ramped up its spending on chips and data centres to build new AI models and support wider adoption of the technology.

“In total, it will make sense,” Dimon said on Tuesday when asked about surging spending plans for AI infrastructure. “If you want to try to pick the winners and losers, you will have a hard time.” BLOOMBERG