Anthropic expands Barclays partnership, Claude Code to reach 50% of developers by year-end

Barclays announced on October 1 an expanded strategic collaboration with Anthropic to integrate Claude across the bank's global operations, accelerating software development, modernizing legacy systems, and improving operational efficiency. Barclays Group Co-COOs Anne Marie Darling and Craig Bright framed the expansion as more than adopting AI: it is about reshaping how work gets done inside a well-governed security envelope so technical experts can focus on the hardest problems. Anthropic CCO Paul Smith called it a significant milestone for Anthropic in the UK, noting that Claude already helps 16,000 Barclays colleagues find answers for customers, sorts 120,000 emails a day, and will be in the hands of most Barclays engineers by 2027.

Two production deployments already run on Claude at the bank. First, the UK Colleague Knowledge Assistant, live since 2025 and built on a retrieval-augmented generation architecture, supports customer-facing work for more than 20 million UK retail customers; it is used by more than 16,000 colleagues and has handled over one million searches. Second, in Global Markets, Claude classifies, enriches, and routes about 120,000 inbound client emails a day, reducing manual handling.

In the new phase Barclays expects Claude Code to reach 50% of its developer population by the end of 2026 and a majority of software engineers in 2027. The bank's February efficiency targets include roughly £2 billion (about $2.7 billion) of cost savings through 2027 from measures including AI adoption, which this expanded partnership folds into. Barclays said all use cases are subject to governance, security controls, and human oversight. The move is Anthropic's most recent landing in financial services; the lab has previously worked with FIS on an anti-financial-crime agent and signed deals with Millennium Management, Man Group, and ExodusPoint Capital Management.