(5 November 2026 – United States) Goldman Sachs has drawn the ire of its trading desk after it deterred them from using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools following a review of risk and productivity concerns.
Goldman’s CIO Marco Argenti was publicly praising traders “vibe coding” s recently as July with Goldman acting as a lead underwriter on the mammoth Anthropic IPO alongside Morgan Stanley expected later this month.
Strats, who work across trading, quantitative research and software engineering reportedly still have access.
It comes as Axios reports major US banks have detected unauthorised third-party AI agents operating within customer accounts as some agents attempt to take independent actions to user instructions.
AI agents are infiltrating banking systems faster than financial institutions can respond. The difficulty in distinguishing between a human and an unauthorised bot is forcing banks to block the technology and rapidly rewrite their terms of service.
Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and others are racing to contain agent risks. Barclays expects half its developers to be using Claude Code by the end 2026 yet also named developers among sweeping job cuts.
“We think Goldman was right to restrict the tools and wrong in how it went about it. A trading floor is a bad place for unreviewed code written by people who can’t read it, and the information barrier problem would be reason enough on its own. Requiring that agent-written code come from people trained to review it is a sensible rule for a regulated business” commented State of AI Editor-in-Chief Melissa Rosenthal.
“Like Goldman, Barclays is giving coding agents to engineers. Unlike Goldman, it is also using them to reduce how many engineers it employs.”