Anthropic Is Now Targeting Finance After Revolutionizing Coding

After upending the coding world with Claude Code, Anthropic has a new target: financial services. The company announced on Tuesday that it’s releasing 10 new AI agents catering to different types of financial work including building pitchbooks, reviewing earnings, drafting credit memos and auditing statements.

On Monday, Anthropic also launched a $1.5 billion joint venture with Wall Street heavyweights like Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman and Friedman to create an AI-native financial services firm. It plans to deploy its own engineers to help integrate its technology at the firms’ portfolio companies. The AI giant is also building an agent to help banks fight financial crimes like money laundering.

Anthropic’s focus on the financial sector began last summer with a separate tool for banks and large institutions. Now financial firms like Citi, Citadel and Goldman Sachs make up about 40% of its top 50 customers and the sector is the second largest in terms of enterprise revenue, the company said. Doubling down on the financial services market is a smart move, especially because big chunks of financial services work is repetitive, time consuming and relies on rule-based processes, thus making it easier to automate.

At an Anthropic event in New York today, CEO Dario Amodei warned that last month’s launch of Anthropic’s cyber security model Mythos has exposed thousands of vulnerabilities in software used by banks, tech firms and governments that need to be fixed within the next six to eight months before Chinese models catch up. He also raised concerns that enterprise software companies that don’t lean into AI could “lose market value, go bankrupt or completely go bust.”

In case you missed it, Forbes published its eighth annual AI 50 list, with sponsoring partner Mayfield, that highlights the most promising privately held AI companies in the world.

Now let’s get into the headlines.

POLITICS

The White House seems to be changing its tune on AI. After initially proposing a “light touch” approach towards regulations and safety, the Commerce Department announced agreements with tech giants Google, Microsoft and xAI on Tuesday that will allow the Trump administration to review new AI models before they’re publicly released. Given the government’s public fallout with Anthropic, the new agreements raise major questions about the government’s role in AI development and use — and if Trump will try to censor AI models’ output about him.

HUMANS OF AI

Companies spend millions on consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte and Ernst & Young to help with complex projects like migrating systems and data from one software to another. But the manual process is messy, expensive and largely inefficient. So Kabir Nagrecha, 22, cofounded Tessera Labs to use AI agents instead of humans to help large enterprises like Xerox and pharma company Merck shrink costs. The startup has picked up $60 million in capital from bigwigs like Andreessen Horowitz, and reached a $320 million valuation, Forbes reported.

AI DEAL OF THE WEEK

AI coding startup Blitzy raised $200 million in funding at a $1.4 billion valuation, Forbes reported. The startup ingests hundreds of thousands of lines of code to map out how different components work together to churn out production-ready software in a matter of days or weeks, no engineers needed.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman confessed that his stake in the company is worth close to $30 billion during the high-stakes Musk versus OpenAI trial, Forbes reported. “Financially what will take me to $1B?” Brockman wrote in a September 2017 diary entry, according to documents unsealed as part of the lawsuit. Musk’s lawyers used Brockman’s diary entries to argue Brockman was driven by financial incentives rather than OpenAI’s founding mission to develop safe AI for humanity’s benefit.

DEEP DIVE

Inside Suno’s $2.5 Billion Bet That AI-Made Music Is Here To Stay

On a frosty February evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mikey Shulman is spinning up a new song. His electric bass guitar hangs idly on a nearby wall. A 61-key synthesizer and drum kit remain untouched a few doors away. Instead, he types a few sparse phrases – pedal steel guitar, country Americana folk, acoustic guitar — into his startup Suno’s AI music generation software.

A few seconds later, a song comes to life: fluid guitar strums and human-sounding vocals with a smooth Southern accent soar over an upbeat tempo. It’s instantly catchy, like if Ella Langley met Lana Del Rey.

The tune isn’t a chart-topper or a summer hit, but it’s evidence enough for why more than 100 million people have now used Suno to make music. Suno-created songs have gone viral on TikTok, debuted on Billboard charts and racked up millions of streams. Over 7 million songs are made on the app every day, catapulting it to the top of the Apple App Store’s most downloaded music apps in April — surpassing Spotify.

“The technology finally allows for billions of people to be creative, to have the fruits of their labor, to feel fulfillment in a different way,” says CEO Shulman, 39. He calls it a “new form of consumer entertainment.”

But that’s come at the cost of professional musicians. In its early days, Suno said that it trained its AI model on tens of millions of copyrighted songs scraped from the internet, triggering fierce backlash. In 2024, some 200 artists including Katy Perry, Billie Eilish and Nicki Minaj called out AI companies for training their models on artists’ work without their permission. In July 2024, Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and the Recording Industry Association of America hit Suno with a massive lawsuit, alleging that it illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted recordings from YouTube to train its model without getting permission from rights holders or providing compensation. “It’s a copyright chop shop,” an industry executive told Forbes.

The music industry’s griping hasn’t stopped the four-year-old startup from becoming a smash-hit success. The startup’s annualized revenue tripled from $100 million in October (about $8 million that month) to $300 million in February (about $25 million that month). In 2025, the startup’s revenue was about $150 million, Forbes estimates. VCs are sold too. Suno has picked up $375 million in funding from top-tier investment firms like Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix, nabbing a $2.45 billion valuation in November.

Read the full story on Forbes.

MODEL BEHAVIOR

After a recent model update, ChatGPT increasingly started referencing goblins, gremlins and other fantasy creatures, OpenAI said in a blog post. “The goblins kept multiplying, and we needed to figure out where they came from,” the post read. The root cause: the model was given a nerdy personality and was rewarded for producing metaphors with creatures. When OpenAI pulled the plug on its nerdy personality, the goblins started to disappear. RIP.