Anthropic launches financial AI agents, impacting data providers like FactSet
On Tuesday, Anthropic launched AI agents for the financial services industry, prompting concerns in the market about the impact on traditional financial data providers; shares of companies like FactSet and Morningstar fell noticeably that day.
The 10 AI agents released are capable of drafting roadshow materials, reviewing financial statements, and compliance alerts, covering professional fields such as banking, insurance, asset management, and fintech.
They also integrate with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, significantly boosting analysts’ efficiency in updating data, building financial models, and preparing presentation materials.
Following the announcement, FactSet Research Systems’ stock price fell as much as 8.1% intraday before rebounding; Morningstar erased its early gains and dropped more than 3%; S&P Global and Moody’s Corp also faced significant selling pressure.
On Tuesday local time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spoke at a company event in New York alongside JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. The event was attended by many banking executives, highlighting the continued expansion of this AI startup's influence on Wall Street.
Finance becomes a new battleground for AI commercialization
Anthropic's push into the financial industry is its latest move to compete directly with OpenAI. Both companies are actively expanding industry applications beyond programming tools, aiming to strengthen their revenue base ahead of anticipated IPOs.
“Finance is the perfect blueprint for knowledge work,” said Nicholas Lin, Anthropic’s head of financial services products. He believes that AI applications in finance are “only a few months behind programming applications,” which have already shown considerable acceleration.
Amodei pointed out the bottleneck in commercialization:
“Our ability to commercialize this technology and generate revenue from it is limited not by the capability of the model itself or the theoretical economic value it can create, but by the speed at which technology spreads into the real world.”
This is not Anthropic’s first targeted initiative in the financial sector. In February this year, the company launched Claude plugins customized for financial analysis, equity research, private equity, and wealth management, and at the same time released a new model claimed to be better at financial research.
Currently, Anthropic already has more than 300,000 enterprise clients utilizing its technology to automate parts of their workflow.
At the channel level, Anthropic is deepening its ties with the financial sector by forming a joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, aimed at promoting and deploying Anthropic’s software across more companies. OpenAI has also planned similar partnership structures.
Integration with Microsoft Office boosts productivity
With this new release, Anthropic announced it will further enhance Claude’s ability to collaborate with third-party software like Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and will integrate data from financial partners such as Dun & Bradstreet and Moody’s.
In Outlook, Claude agents can process inbox emails, schedule meetings, and draft responses.
In Excel, it can build financial models from files and data sources, audit formulas across linked workbooks, and run sensitivity analyses.
In PowerPoint, it can automatically update presentations, and sync them automatically when the underlying data changes.
In Word, it can edit credit notes and similar documents based on company templates.
Claude is able to share its knowledge and context across these four platforms—after analysts create models in Excel, there is no need to re-explain them in PowerPoint.
Executives from CITADEL and FIS said that Claude tools’ use in finance has greatly improved work efficiency.
Valuation approaches one trillion, capital race heats up
According to Bloomberg, Anthropic has begun preparing for a new round of financing, with a potential valuation exceeding $900 billion, possibly surpassing OpenAI to become the world's most valuable AI startup.
Like OpenAI, Anthropic’s investments in chip procurement and data center construction continue to rise to support the development of new models and broader technology deployment.
When asked Tuesday about the surge in AI infrastructure spending, Dimon said: "Overall, it makes sense. If you try to pick winners and losers, you'll find it very difficult."
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