Barclays to put Claude Code in the hands of half its developers by year-end
Barclays is expanding its partnership with Anthropic and says half of its developers will be using Claude Code by the end of 2026, with most following in 2027.
Barclays is making one of the boldest enterprise bets on agentic coding yet. The British universal bank said Thursday it is expanding its strategic collaboration with Anthropic, and the headline number for developers is specific: Barclays expects half of its developers to be using Claude Code by the end of this year, with most of them using it by the end of 2027.
The announcement, made in a joint statement with Anthropic, moves Claude from pilots and individual productivity tools into the infrastructure of one of Europe's largest banks. Barclays says it is adding agentic capabilities for building, testing, securing, and operating technology, with legacy platform modernization and software quality as the stated goals.
What is already running
The targets come on top of deployments Barclays says are already live. Its Colleague Knowledge Assistant, a Claude-powered tool built on a retrieval-augmented generation architecture, has been adopted by more than 16,000 UK colleagues since it went live in 2025 and has handled over one million searches. The assistant helps staff find information faster while serving the bank's more than 20 million UK retail customers.
In its Global Markets business, Claude models classify, enrich, and route incoming client emails. Barclays says the platform processes approximately 120,000 emails each day, reducing manual handling while keeping humans responsible for the resulting actions.
Why it matters
"The true measure of any technology is the impact it has on customers, clients, and colleagues, and the outcomes it enables," said Anne Marie Darling, group co-chief operating officer at Barclays. Her co-COO Craig Bright said AI systems are reshaping software engineering and cybersecurity, adding that Barclays is using Claude "to help modernize legacy platforms, improve software quality and allow our technical experts to focus on the most complex challenges."
Anthropic's chief commercial officer Paul Smith put the bank's pitch in one sentence: "Claude now 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."
Read the numbers with the usual care. The developer figures are targets, not adoption already achieved, and the usage stats are vendor-reported, not independently audited. Even so, a heavily regulated institution with legacy systems everywhere putting a public timeline on most of its engineers is a signal about where enterprise demand for coding agents is heading. Anthropic is clearly making finance a beachhead: Bloomberg reports ExodusPoint, Millennium Management, and Man Group among the firms working with the company, as it prepares for a much-discussed public listing.
Barclays and Anthropic announced the expansion on October 1, with further detail reported by PYMNTS.
