Anthropic deepens finance push as CEO Amodei warns of software disruption

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NEW YORK, May 5 : Artificial-intelligence lab Anthropic is diving deeper into the financial services industry, releasing tools on Tuesday that can speed up myriad tasks for banks and insurers while CEO Dario Amodei predicted further software disruption.

Pegged to a New York event hosted by Anthropic, the startup 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 into 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 by enterprise revenue after technology clients, Anthropic said.

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Speaking from the stage at the packed event, Amodei said Anthropic's revenue in the first quarter had grown "80x" on an annualized basis. A later slide presentation also stated: "Coding has changed forever. Finance is next," 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.

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'

Amodei appeared onstage in a joint interview with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. Asked about AI's impact on jobs, Dimon said that technology would improve lives and that its negative impacts were also "a legitimate concern."

The Anthropic CEO had a stark forecast for software disruption. 

For months, Anthropic's drive to automate enterprise work has hammered an array of software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, due to anticipation that the AI provider could supplant their businesses. The San Francisco-based startup has said it wants to improve outcomes for customers, rather than replace them.

Amodei said at the event that AI is making software development cheaper and will cause the industry to grow overall. However, he said, "I don't know what will happen to the group of today's SaaS incumbents." The companies that address AI head-on can do better than ever, while others may "lose market value, go bankrupt, completely go bust," he said.

In an earlier Reuters interview, Nicholas Lin, who leads Anthropic's financial services product work, said an increasingly capable Claude would develop "vertical-specific intelligence," for instance in finance, even as the startup's AI is widely applicable across industries.

AI model advances, coupled with hands-on customer support and key office software integrations, were underpinning the rapid uptick in Anthropic's financial services business, said Lin.

As part of its product announcement, Anthropic said its 10 new AI agents could plug in to its Claude Code and Cowork software out of the box, and could be customized to a firm's policies and style.

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