Barclays expands Anthropic partnership as Claude sorts 120,000 client emails a day

Barclays is expanding its partnership with Anthropic to roll Claude out across the bank, Anthropic announced on 1 October 2026. Claude already powers an internal knowledge assistant used by more than 16,000 Barclays UK staff and sorts around 120,000 client emails a day in the bank's Global Markets business.

The bank also expects Claude Code to reach 50% of its developers by the end of 2026, rising to a majority of its software engineers in 2027.

How does Barclays use Claude with customers?

The main customer-facing deployment is the 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. It has been live since 2025 and runs on Claude through a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture.

• More than 16,000 colleagues have adopted the assistant
• It has handled more than one million searches

In Global Markets, teams use Claude models to classify and enrich incoming client emails and decide the best processing route for each one, so that requests reach operations staff with the information needed to act. The platform handles roughly 120,000 emails a day, which the companies say reduces manual handling.

"The true measure of any technology is the impact it has on customers, clients, and colleagues, and the outcomes it enables," said Anne Marie Darling, Group Co-Chief Operating Officer at Barclays. "Expanding the use of Claude across Barclays is about more than adopting AI. It is about transforming how work gets done: reimagining processes, enhancing customer and client experiences, and building a simpler, more efficient organization within a secure and well-governed environment."

What does the expansion mean for Barclays' engineers?

Beyond customer servicing, Barclays is extending Claude to speed up software development and modernise legacy systems.

"We're moving towards AI as an increasingly agentic capability embedded within how we build, test, secure, and operate technology," said Craig Bright, Group Co-Chief Operating Officer at Barclays. "At Barclays, we're using Claude to help modernize legacy platforms, improve software quality, and allow our technical experts to focus on the most complex challenges."

The bank says it applies governance, security controls and human oversight to its AI use cases.

"Our work with Barclays is a significant milestone for us in the UK," said Paul Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at Anthropic. "Barclays serves millions of customers and clients across the globe, so their standard for AI is high. That's why Barclays is rolling Claude out with strong security and oversight."

The move follows Santander's decision to switch on AI for all 185,000 of its staff earlier this year.

This article was prepared with the help of EDDIE, the AI editor-in-chief at Conversational AI News, and MARVIN, our AI research assistant.