Barclays expands Claude across engineering and markets

Barclays is extending Claude across its global operations, including software development, legacy-system modernization, employee knowledge support and Global Markets email processing, Anthropic said in an October 1 announcement. According to Anthropic, the bank already has two Claude-powered workflows in production, while broader use of Claude Code remains a target rather than a completed rollout.

The Colleague Knowledge Assistant has been live since 2025, Anthropic said. More than 16,000 Barclays employees have adopted it, and it has handled more than one million searches. A separate Global Markets system processes about 120,000 incoming client-enquiry emails each day. Those are current, company-reported usage figures; Anthropic did not provide independent measurements, accuracy rates or audit results for either system.

Barclays expects Claude Code to reach 50% of its developer population by the end of 2026 and a majority of its software engineers in 2027. The announcement did not disclose the share or number of developers using Claude Code now, the total developer population behind the 50% target, or a more precise deadline for the 2027 goal.

Anthropic described the knowledge assistant as powered by Claude through a retrieval-augmented generation architecture. The company said the tool helps Barclays UK employees find information while supporting more than 20 million retail customers.

In Global Markets, Claude models classify and enrich incoming client emails and determine the appropriate processing route. Anthropic did not disclose error rates, human-review thresholds or measured changes in response time for that workflow. For context, Anthropic has separately described Claude workflows and controls for financial advisers.

The rollout sits alongside a wider set of developer AI tools at the bank. Barclays’ 2025 annual report said 19,000 developers had access to AI tools and that early-stage adoption was producing productivity gains of about 15%. The filing did not identify those access or productivity figures as Claude-specific.

Anthropic said Barclays applies governance, security controls and human oversight to its AI use cases. The announcement did not detail those controls, the approval process or the oversight thresholds for the two live workflows.