Goldman Sachs taps Anthropic’s Claude to automate accounting

Goldman Sachs has been working with the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic to create AI agents to automate a growing number of roles within the bank, the firm’s tech chief told CNBC exclusively.

The bank has, for the past six months, been working with embedded Anthropic engineers to co-develop autonomous agents in at least two specific areas: accounting for trades and transactions, and client vetting and onboarding, according to Marco Argenti, Goldman’s chief information officer.

The firm is “in the early stages” of developing agents based on Anthropic’s Claude model that will collapse the amount of time these essential functions take, Argenti said. He expects to launch the agents “soon,” though he declined to provide a specific date.

“Think of it as a digital co-worker for many of the professions within the firm that are scaled, are complex and very process intensive,” he said.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in October that his bank was embarking on a multiyear plan to reorganize itself around generative AI, the technology that has made waves since the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. Even as investment banks like Goldman are experiencing surging revenue from trading and advisory activities, it will seek to “constrain headcount growth” amid the overhaul, Solomon said.

The news from Goldman comes as model updates from Anthropic, co-founded by a former OpenAI executive, have sparked a sharp sell-off among software firms and their credit providers as investors wager on who the winners and losers from the AI trade will be.

Goldman began last year by testing an autonomous AI coder called Devin, which is now broadly available to the bank’s engineers. But it quickly found that Anthropic’s AI model could work in other parts of the bank, Argenti said. 

“Claude is really good at coding,” Argenti said. “Is that because coding is kind of special, or is it about the model’s ability to reason through complex problems, step-by-step, applying logic?”

Argenti said the firm was “surprised” at how capable Claude was at tasks besides coding, especially in areas like accounting and compliance that combine the need to parse large amounts of data and documents while applying rules and judgment, he said.

Now, the view within Goldman is that “there are these other areas of the firm where we could expect the same level of automation and the same level of results that we’re seeing on the coding side,” he said.

The upshot is that, with the help of the agents in development, clients will be onboarded faster and issues with trade reconciliation or other accounting matters will be solved faster, Argenti said.

Goldman could next develop agents for tasks like employee surveillance or making investment banking pitchbooks, he said. 

While the bank employs thousands of people in the compliance and accounting functions where AI agents will soon operate, Argenti said that it was “premature” to expect that the technology will lead to job losses for those workers.

Still, Goldman could cut out third-party providers it uses today as AI technology matures, he said.

“It’s always a trade-off,” Argenti said. “Our philosophy right now is that we’re injecting capacity, which in most cases will allow us to do things faster, which translates to a better client experience and more business.”