Summary
Anthropic says Barclays is expanding Claude across its global operations, including software development and legacy-system modernisation. Existing deployments include a UK employee knowledge assistant and email workflows in Global Markets.
Anthropic says Barclays is expanding its use of Claude across the bank’s global operations, with plans covering software development, legacy-system modernisation and operational workflows. The announcement describes two deployments already in use and sets out expected adoption of Claude Code among Barclays developers.
The expansion brings AI into a wider range of work at a large, regulated financial institution. Barclays says its use of AI is subject to governance, security controls and human oversight.
Existing uses in customer support and markets
Barclays’ Colleague Knowledge Assistant has been live since 2025. It uses Claude with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture: the system retrieves relevant information to provide context for a model’s response. Barclays employees use it to find information while assisting the bank’s UK retail customers, a group the announcement says numbers more than 20 million.
Anthropic reports that more than 16,000 colleagues have adopted the assistant and that it has handled over one million searches. The companies describe its purpose as helping employees find information faster and support customers more quickly. The announcement presents these figures as measures of use; they are not direct measures of customer-service outcomes.
In Barclays’ Global Markets business, Claude models help process incoming client emails. The workflow classifies and enriches messages, then determines a processing route so operations teams can prioritise requests and identify information needed to act. Anthropic says the platform handles approximately 120,000 emails a day and reduces manual handling.
A broader engineering rollout
Barclays is also extending Claude to software development, including work to modernise legacy platforms and improve software quality. The bank expects Claude Code adoption to reach 50% of its developer population by the end of 2026, rising to a majority of software engineers in 2027. These are expected adoption levels, not figures for current usage.
The announcement frames the expansion as a shift toward AI being embedded in how technology is built, tested, secured and operated. If the planned rollout proceeds, Claude will be used across a broader range of Barclays’ technical work alongside the employee-support and email-processing applications already described.
Barclays says responsible deployment includes governance, security controls and human oversight. That is particularly relevant as the bank expands AI use in software and operational processes, where outputs may inform work by employees. The announcement does not detail how those controls are applied to each individual workflow.