As it continues to aggressively push into the enterprise market and build agentic AI tools, Anthropic is now targeting a major industry: finance.
The AI lab introduced ten ready-to-run agent templates earlier this week, targeting what it said is the most time-consuming work in financial services, such as building pitchbooks, screening due diligence files and closing the books at the end of the month. The templates ship as a plugin in Claude Cowork and Claude Code. Each template is a reference architecture that includes skills (instructions and domain knowledge), connectors (access to data) and subagents (powered by other Claude versions), Anthropic said. The AI lab said that financial firms can adapt any of the agents to their own modeling conventions, risk policies and approval flows.
Also this week, Anthropic entered into a $1.6 billion joint venture with Fidelity National Information Services for financial crime software and another $1.5 billion joint venture with other Wall Street companies to sell its AI tools to businesses.
The financial services agents and other financial ventures are further signs that Anthropic has begun to evolve from a model provider into an AI platform provider serving specific industries. Earlier this year, the Claude stunned the legal industry when it introduced its Claude Cowork plugins, which some saw as a threat to entry-level legal jobs and legal information providers. In April, the cybersecurity industry also became worried about Claude Mythos’ ability to identify and exploit security weaknesses.
Now, the AI model maker is at it again, this time creating agents to support research, client coverage, and finance and operations.
A Focus on Enterprise
On the one hand, Anthropic appears to be on track to profitability after losing money since its 2021 founding, as it approaches an expected IPO this year.
“Anthropic has done a really strong job of going after enterprise business,” said Tom Coshow, an analyst at Gartner. “Most people would agree that it’s been impressive.”
In targeting the enterprise market, the vendor has also pursued the mindshare and opportunities that software service providers saw in AI technology, as well as with older financial services firms with dated IT systems. With these new agents, Anthropic competes against traditional data systems like Bloomberg and FactSet, which junior analysts use to pull together comparative analyses, as well as legacy consulting services such as Infosys and Accenture.
The Industry
With the financial service agents, Anthropic is going after one of the most lucrative industries in the country, said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data science and AI strategy at University of Illinois Chicago.
The finance industry holds sensitive data and manages special client relationships. Enterprises will have to decide whether to grant agents access to that sensitive information, Bennett said. However, ROI is also important in finance.
“This is a major tool for increasing ROI on those [finance] relationships,” Bennett said. “If only for the increase in speed, in preparation, in advising and actually even finding new clients, there’s going to have to be a lot of soul searching in the industry.”
Hard Choices
Moreover, with Anthropic’s domain-specific agents now threatening smaller finance companies with expertise in these areas, those firms will likely need to make challenging decisions.
“Would enterprises be better off partnering with a company that builds AI agents for finance, or do Anthropic agents really know how to handle all the edge cases out of the book?” Coshow said. “If they do, that’s a very big threat to a lot of people.” It’s also unclear if the Anthropic agents require tweaks and significant work to connect to data, he added.
“Everything involving AI agents is about whether or not they can contextualize the data that they’re using to make a decision about what to do and how reliable they are,” Coshow added. “How much of their AI are they going to own, and do they feel like they own it if Anthropic is doing everything for them?” he continued. “This is the intelligence that is going to drive enterprises in five years.”
The Career Threat
In addition to the dangers to smaller vendors and the potential existential crisis facing older financial firms and newer fintech vendors, the new agents could erode the roles of junior finance associates and entry-level analysts, Bennett said.
“The work that they do now is going to be covered in many instances by a subscription,” he said. “We should expect a significant impact in the industry, if only for that reason.”
He added that educators will also face pressure to figure out how to train entry-level finance workers to advance in an environment in which AI agents are proliferating.
