Barclays expands Claude across the bank and expects half its developers on Claude Code by year-end
Barclays is rolling Anthropic's Claude out more widely, from a staff assistant used by 16,000 colleagues to a system that sorts 120,000 emails a day. Most of its software engineers should use Claude Code by 2027.
By ScoviAI Team
Key points
- Announced October 1, 2026
- Barclays expects 50% of its developers to use Claude Code by the end of 2026, and a majority of engineers in 2027
- A Claude-powered knowledge assistant has 16,000+ users and has handled over 1 million searches
- In Global Markets, Claude helps process about 120,000 client emails a day
Barclays, the British universal bank, is widening its use of Anthropic's AI across its global operations. The headline target is about software: the bank expects half of its developers to be using Claude Code by the end of 2026, rising to a majority of its software engineers in 2027.
What Barclays uses Claude for
The announcement lists three main areas.
Helping staff answer customers. Barclays UK's Colleague Knowledge Assistant has been live since 2025. It helps employees find answers quickly when they support the bank's more than 20 million UK retail customers. It's powered by Claude using retrieval-augmented generation, a setup where the AI looks up the bank's own documents before answering. More than 16,000 colleagues use it, and it has handled over one million searches.
Sorting client email. In Barclays' Global Markets business, Claude models classify incoming emails, add missing details and route each one to the right team. The system processes about 120,000 emails a day.
Modernizing old systems. The bank is using Claude to speed up software development, improve code quality and update legacy platforms, a big job at any large, long-established bank.
"Software engineering and cyber security are both being reshaped by increasingly capable AI systems." Craig Bright, Group Co-Chief Operating Officer, Barclays
Why a bank moves carefully
Banks are among the most heavily regulated businesses, so the announcement stresses governance. Barclays says it applies security controls and human oversight to its AI use cases. Anthropic's Chief Commercial Officer, Paul Smith, put it this way: "Very few institutions hold AI to such a high standard."
How it fits a wider trend
Big companies are moving from small pilots to company-wide AI rollouts. In the same month, Volkswagen gave Microsoft Copilot to 330,000 employees and Uber rolled out ChatGPT Work. Barclays' plan stands out for its focus on engineers: coding assistants are where companies say they see the clearest gains.
What the announcement doesn't give is hard outcome data, such as time saved per engineer or error rates. Those are the numbers that will show whether the rollout pays off.
Sources
ScoviAI Team is the ScoviAI newsroom. We write every article ourselves from the original announcements and link our sources. Spotted a mistake? Tell us and we'll fix it.
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