Barclays, the British universal bank, is expanding its strategic collaboration with Anthropic to deploy secure, enterprise-grade AI systems across its global operations, according to an announcement from the AI company. The bank is extending Claude across the organisation to accelerate software development, modernise legacy systems and improve operational efficiency.
As part of the rollout, Barclays 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. The company frames the effort as more than tooling: integrating AI across a large, complex and highly regulated institution requires both capable technology and disciplined governance.
One example already in production is Barclays' Colleague Knowledge Assistant, which helps Barclays UK employees find information and answers more quickly when supporting the bank's more than 20 million UK retail customers. Live since 2025 and built on a retrieval-augmented generation architecture powered by Claude, the assistant has been adopted by more than 16,000 colleagues and has handled over one million searches.
Within Barclays' Global Markets business, Claude models are used to classify, enrich and route incoming client emails, helping prioritise requests and ensure they contain the information operations colleagues need to act. The platform processes approximately 120,000 emails each day, reducing manual handling activity.
Barclays says responsible deployment remains central to the partnership, with robust governance, security controls and human oversight applied to AI use cases. "Our work with Barclays is a significant milestone for us in the UK," said Paul Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at Anthropic. "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."
Barclays Group Co-Chief Operating Officers Anne Marie Darling and Craig Bright described the expansion as a transformation of how work gets done — reimagining processes, improving customer and client experiences, and modernising legacy platforms — while keeping deployment within a secure and well-governed environment.