alt Hacker NewsGoldman Sachs is pulling Claude Code from its bankers and traders
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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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
They should use something like Synthetiq to let the traders build apps but keep it in a managed environment with observability and policy enforcement
It's really hard to make these models useful and safe. Useful means wide adoption, long running tasks with no human in the loop, wide access to read and write data (analysis, summaries, dashboards, etc).
Safe means containers, guardrails, egress filters, human in the loop, deliberate per agent mcp controls, and real expertise in prompting/task selection, etc.
So far the pattern I've seen is security teams say no, it gets escalated, it's allowed, then 1% of the time the model yeets data where it's not supposed to (no amount of promoting or controls seems to really fix this), it's locked back down.
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.
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.
Those cost is one thing but security is a huge issue too. Agents in their current incarnation leak data all over the place.
This IPO is too juicy for it to be a fair game.
Goldman Sachs is lead left on the Anthropi IPO, so dropping this in the middle of that process is a wild move.
Im more suprised this was allowed in the first place
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!
Businesses are just realizing that spending 50k a year per employee on an app/ide doesnt make sense...
Im not convinced it's creating any economic value at all.
Like 10% of people use it reasonably/responsibly and the other 90% basically become turbo lazy. I think I'd rather my employees be working "slow" but actually working hard and not just functioning as meat proxies for mediocre bots and reducing my workforce to some median competency.
There's no edge in using the same tools that everyone else is using, especially in markets/finance.
Let your competition all melt their brains, maybe only give employees you know are actual super contributors, (and not just mentally offshoring their work) unlimited access to llms.
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.
why not just do a Palantir integration and leverage all the tools through that, instead of directly?
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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.
Internal guidance updated in October restricts Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub to the bank's engineers
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.
> "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.
> 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.
Agentic engineering needs to be "all in".
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."
Who would have thought that having experience would matter in software engineering as well... Just like it does for every other field.
It's mind boggling how hard business people keep trying to replace software engineers.
I suspect it might be because it's a real skill which businesses depend on so this makes engineers hard to replace and gives them more leverage to push back on unethical business conduct. If you're a manager, your value lies entirely in your ability to stay aligned with business objectives and to align others with those objectives. You have no value besides that hence you have zero leverage to push back on anything which stands in the way of those objectives, including ethics. Engineers have some leverage and hence they can push back a fair bit without putting themselves in the firing line but that makes them a problem for leaders of the organization.
Compare that to an HR manager; they can't lift their pinky finger if it doesn't align with business objectives; even a slight hint of doing so would immediately put them in the firing line because alignment is almost 100% of the job.
When the AI companies are making the big math breakthroughs, it's clear that one of the most lucrative things they can do with their capability is hold it back and run a hedge fund. Knowing how Goldman and others do things at all levels is a massive accelerator. Goldman just woke up to that fact.
> Amazon shut down an internal leaderboard after employees ran agents on pointless tasks
Looks like someone was overusing the good old <https://github.com/calvin-ll/is-even-ai>.
Jokes aside, I bet this sums up the difference between an engineer and a regular user who might just use whatever API they can find (although I concur that no single 2026 LLM would ever propose that).
“ When someone outside engineering builds a tool with Claude Code or Copilot, a named engineer should take responsibility for it before it touches production data.”
Why would a dev agree to this? Maintenance only for an incompetently generated tool? Absurd.
Funny how David Solomon used ai for his Wharton School MBA graduation speech, but now is banning it at his company.
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.
Check out the image in the article. Take a close look at the middle trader. I've heard about "one arm tied behind your back" but this is the next level.
is this gonna have an impact on gas prices in Europe, too?
is claude on the waiting list of shooting stuff going through the strait of Hormuz?
isn't goldman sachs like a caring foster step mother to big AI corps in the MSX White Label OpenAI NVIDIA Soviet?
wait, are they about to increase prices while deteriorating the current cohort of models? god damn it!
did the whole rewind on RE cause a bit of an AI getting worse cuz it cant use the best AI anymore syndrome, some inverse of AI imposter syndrome? ho-ly shit!
Instead of reading I spent time studying those traders with both hands left! Ironically they are obviously the ones who need claude the most.
> 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.
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.
Maybe this site should restrict the use of Claude to write its articles.
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.
From the article: They are only pulling it from bankers and traders and only in Hong Kong. This isn't as big of a news as the title makes it seem. Engineers still get to use Claude Code and other AI coding tools, nothing to see here folks.
Giving a coding tool to a non engineer is like giving a chainsaw to a 5 year old. You just don't do that.
Nice that the header image is AI slop where one of the bankers has an arm coming out of his back. Helps drive home the message.
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 anti-AI movement is gaining grounds every day! \o/
AI skynet has not yet won.
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.