As Bloomberg News reported Monday (Nov. 2), Goldman had for months allowed bankers to use tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and Microsoft’s GitHub on the job. Now, those tools will be limited to Goldman’s engineers only, according to internal guidance published last month and seen by Bloomberg.
A source familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the ban has frustrated some Goldman traders, who had used AI for things like monitoring client trading flows or creating written and graphic materials.
As recently as July, Goldman Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti had touted the “vibe coding” by non-technical employees at Goldman, the report added. Those workers had developed solutions with AI tools and passed on their creations to one of the firm’s 12,000 engineers to enhance, he said in an interview.
“We make certain AI tools available to our people to determine the best use cases across different parts of the firm,” Nick Carcaterra, a Goldman spokesperson, told Bloomberg.
“After a period of experimentation where we assess a variety of factors including productivity and risk management, we put them in the hands of those who are best suited to leverage them for the long term.”
The report notes that this is happening at a moment when banks are spending millions on artificial intelligence tools while also trying to determine how to deal with rising concerns related to cost, productivity and cybersecurity risk.
JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon warned of “rogue agents” and said during a third-quarter earnings call last month that outside AI agents would not be permitted inside the bank.
Bank of America followed a day later with a condition instead of a ban. As covered here in October, the bank is placing limits on agents’ access to consumer deposits while it develops protocols that decide which party is liable for a payment an AI authorizes.
“By Friday, Citigroup had drawn the same line,” that report said. “The bank does not let third-party agents log into accounts or transact.”
In other artificial intelligence news, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that 60% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using AI said the technology lets them produce more without taking on new employees.
“The findings suggested that AI’s most consequential labor market impact may not be the employees that companies eliminate, but the positions they no longer need to create,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “As automation makes routine work cheaper, the same forces reducing demand for labor may be creating a new market for human judgment and accountability, something harder to automate.”
