Anthropic launches slew of AI finance tools as CEO warns some software firms will ‘go bust’

NEW YORK – Artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic is diving deeper into the financial services industry, releasing tools on May 5 to speed up myriad tasks for banks and insurers, while its chief executive Dario Amodei predicts further software disruption.

At a New York event hosted by Anthropic, the start-up launched 10 financially focused agents or AI programs that carry out tasks with limited human intervention. These include agents that can build a pitchbook, audit statements or draft credit memos, Anthropic said.

The company also announced new data sources that its so-called Claude AI can access to do financial work.

Hardly a year after unveiling ambitions to tailor AI for finance, Anthropic has rapidly expanded its business, with adoption by Goldman Sachs, Visa, Citi, AIG and others. Some 40 per cent of Anthropic’s top 50 customers are financial institutions, and the industry represents its second-largest sector by enterprise revenue after technology clients, Anthropic said.

Speaking from the stage at the packed event, Mr Amodei said Anthropic’s revenue in the first quarter had grown “80x” on an annualised basis.

A later slide presentation also stated: “Coding has changed forever. Finance is next.” It was referring to the rise of AI-powered programming, a domain led by Anthropic. Already, for instance, banks have been scrambling to access Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model to shore up their cybersecurity.

Mr Amodei said Mythos had probably found tens of thousands of vulnerabilities across industries so far and that there should be legislation or rules on the release of powerful AI models.

Software firms may ‘go bust’

The Anthropic CEO had a stark forecast for software disruption. For months, Anthropic’s drive to automate enterprise work has put pressure on an array of software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, due to anticipation that the AI provider could supplant their businesses. The start-up has said that it wants to improve outcomes for customers rather than replace them.

Mr Amodei said at the event that AI is making software development cheaper and will cause the industry to grow overall.

However, he added: “I don’t know what will happen to the group of today’s SaaS incumbents.” Companies that address AI head-on can do better than ever, while others may “lose market value, go bankrupt or completely go bust”, he said.

In an earlier Reuters interview, Mr Nicholas Lin, head of product for financial services at Anthropic, said an increasingly capable Claude would develop “vertical-specific intelligence”, for instance in finance, even as the start-up’s AI is widely applicable across industries.

As part of its product announcement, Anthropic said its 10 new AI agents could plug into its Claude Code and Cowork software out of the box and could be customised to a company’s policies and style. REUTERS