6 ms·

Agents for financial services and insurance

257 points by louiereederson 6mo ago

suriya-ganesh 6mo ago
Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? This probably killed a thousand startups in this space. in the early internet you wouldn't see google creating their own news site or facebook building their own animal farm. what happened to platformication of everything?
- iewjj 6mo ago
  lol these agents are missing the point re. What people actually do in these jobs. This is an attempt to inflate token generation to fool people into increasing anthropic’s valuation.
- gwerbin 6mo ago
  > Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? No, why would they if they have the choice? > what happened to platformication of everything? Business happened. The web works differently from how it used to. The users are different. LLM inference and AI tools is a different core product from search and ads. That, and we have the benefit of hindsight now. Maybe a Google newsroom would've actually been a good idea in 2006 in hindsight, who knows. Also realistically you could say the same thing about Google Maps and Street View. That probably also killed some startups. Google isn't running a charity for startups.
  - wongarsu 6mo ago
    I guess the argument is that a tool built by a company with actual insight into and focus for financial services, with Anthropic as inference provider, would lead to more adoption and more use of Anthropic models. Something Anthropic could achieve either by just leaving things alone and having the best models, or alternatively by starting some kind of incubator or something. AWS might be a good model The issue with that is obviously that most of the generated value would be captured by that company in the middle, while Anthropic would stay in the cost-conscious inference market.
    - noitpmeder 6mo ago
      Why would anthropic at all prefer this approach when that middle man can switch and cost-arbitrage between countless other model providers. We're not talking about what is best for the consumer (ex more competition to force iterations and improvements), but what Anthropic thinks is best for Anthropic.
      - wongarsu 6mo ago
        Make up the lower margins by larger volume because you get much better market penetration. But you are right that this only works if you know the middle-men don't go to other model providers. That's where some kind of incubation program that provides capital or credits or whatever in return for long-term commitments might work But I doubt staying a pure model provider is a winning move. It's a market nobody will win long-term. Almost all of the value to be captured isn't in inference APIs but in how to use them to generate business value. Claude Code was already the right approach, they "just" need to show they can repeat this for other kinds of tasks
        khuey 6mo ago
        > Almost all of the value to be captured isn't in inference APIs but in how to use them to generate business value. If the business value can be generated with a few thousand words in a SKILL.md on top of a commoditized model it doesn't sound like that's a market anyone can win long-term either, and the business value is ultimately going to accrue elsewhere (the customer, the inference hardware provider, etc)
  - ctoth 6mo ago
    I'm confused because I remember using Google News in 2006?
    - suriya-ganesh 6mo ago
      there has been a product called Google News since 2002. It was only aggregating information from news channels
  - anon373839 6mo ago
    This was their play all along with their unethical data collection practices: let others use the APIs to discover the applications, then use the data against them to offer integrated solutions in every vertical of interest. Cursor, once Anthropic’s biggest customer, was one of the early ones they screwed. They are also fighting for their lives because these insane valuations simply aren’t justified by being dumb pipes. Fortunately, open weights models are widely available and have crossed a threshold of usefulness that cements their place as good substitutes.
    - csoups14 6mo ago
      Amazon Basics for Knowledge Work™
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- colesantiago 6mo ago
  > Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? Unfortunately no. The TAM for Anthropic and OpenAI is anything that runs software or a screen. Any software or technology business that has high margins that Anthropic and OpenAI are not doing will be a target. After both their IPO's mandates Wall Street them to push for more growth by competing in other technology business areas or they will get punished in the markets. It is ROI or bust.
- mobattah 6mo ago
  This is premature caution/fear.
- _fizz_buzz_ 6mo ago
  But Google did move into a lot of spaces: maps, mail, docs, etc.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- ambicapter 6mo ago
  > in the early internet you wouldn't see google creating their own news site Google News was definitely a thing (and actually still exists).
  - landian66 6mo ago
    just looked up, it is still a thing - learn something new everyday!
  - suriya-ganesh 6mo ago
    it's been a things since 2002. but it's a news aggregator not directly competing with newyork times
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
- bcrosby95 6mo ago
  Building a startup on an LLM is like building a house on a foundation of quicksand. As the LLM gets better it naturally erodes your moat. It's a completely different dynamic compared to the internet. It's why I'm watching this from the sidelines.
  - intrasight 6mo ago
    Building a business on top of any SaaS platform is building on quicksand. I know that from experience.
  - PyWoody 6mo ago
    I have a close friend who is trying to build a company entirely on top of Claude. He doesn't know how to program. He can't do basic arithmetic. Yet, the company he's building is a "Data Science AI for the Government" because, according to him, all of the data scientists at NOAA don't know what they're doing. I have given up on trying to get through to him how bad of an idea this is. He's unemployed and has been working on this for over a year.
    - blitzar 6mo ago
      Sounds like YC material. Y Combinator is accepting applications for the Summer 2026 Batch funding cycle. Make sure they don't miss out!
    - edm0nd 6mo ago
      Yeah that's the scary part about these coding LLMs. Before, some idiot would pitch their stupid idea to dozens of local webdev companies and banks and get told dozens of times their idea is straight up stupid and never going to work and they are stupid. Now these LLMs allows them to bypass all of that advice and create what they want without any input or even knowing how the tech behind it works. We are so fucked lol
    - ecshafer 6mo ago
      Scientists are pretty solid overall for the Government. Lots of Phds that decide to take the steady reliable income and solid benefits over the risk of Academia for a few post docs hoping for a professor job.
- tyre 6mo ago
  You’re advocating for less competition? AI startup valuations are out of control. People are raising $20m seed rounds. If you can’t prove PMF and differentiation with $10m, I’m sorry but you’re not a serious enterprise. And if what you’re building is “pitch deck AI”, I mean, come on.
- robotswantdata 6mo ago
  History suggests otherwise. railroads, telecoms, search all consolidated. The natural equilibrium for transformative infrastructure is winner take all. AGI/ASI won’t be different but will be nearly every vertical and governments will legislate too little too late.
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    local models are going to win and therefore the hardware providers, Apple and nvidia. There isn't going to be any moat for the hosted providers besides hardware scale. They can run your request on shared 1TB memory hardware, or whatever. But local hardware is going to catch up, the hosted providers are going to become commoditized, and the costs are just going to be compute whether its your hardware or theirs. And your laptop is going to be powerful enough to be good enough for most cases.
    - robotswantdata 6mo ago
      Local hardware catching up doesn’t matter if the thing worth having never leaves the building. Enterprise services are hard, moat is in distribution and know how.
      - colechristensen 6mo ago
        >if the thing worth having never leaves the building Not sure what you're referring to, the models?
  - agentultra 6mo ago
    Nothing natural about it. Such monopolies were propped up by the state using public funds and profits captured by the capital class. Many benefitted by the arrangement and so it became normalized. But it’s a choice people made to structure things that way. The car industry, oil and gas… all could have played out differently if different players had gained wider adoption or if governments used a different economic model.
  - deleted 6mo ago
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- debarshri 6mo ago
  I am not sure if people are using claude design, security review stuff and other tools they have built so far. Building is the easy part. There are lot of service level stuff that I am sure anthropic will not be able to provide, therefore they are trying to partner with other orgs in that realm. I am very skeptical about their stuff now. If you are builder, I believe you should avoid anthropic, it can be default to monopolistic behavior, I am not saying they are doing it, but they could, where in they see what you are building, if you have traction, position a product in that realm. Just saying.
- vatsachak 6mo ago
  > tfw you've been huffing your own copium so much that you forgot you're selling shovels
- sokoloff 6mo ago
  I'm not sure if this was tongue-in-cheek or not, but Yahoo created its own news site in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_News and FB had Zynga's Farmville as well.
  - lordgrenville 6mo ago
    I think OP meant that Farmville was built by a different party (Zynga). FB was trying to encourage other businesses to build apps on its platform, not build them itself.
- _pdp_ 6mo ago
  > Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? Is this a serious question? Without the big labs with deep pockets investing to change the consumer mindset do you think a small company with no funding has any chance of even existing? I remember when paying $1.99 for a mobile game on iOS was considered too expensive and now it seem most consumers are primed to spend more on in-app purchases every week. That mind-shift did not happen overnight. It was not that long ago $200 for ChatGPT subscription was considered extravagant but now even wrappers can charge this price without hesitation - some of them do. What Anthropic is doing is priming the market of which they will be potentially one of the main beneficiaries as long as they can continue existing. But I don't think anyone will go to Anthropic directly to source their financial services agent. They will go to financial service companies that use Anthropic to build the capabilities.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago
  Why control part of the world when you can control it all? Less cynically, you might say that "use AI to do <obvious thing>" is not really a viable startup pitch anymore. That's not necessarily bad.
- owebmaster 6mo ago
  I don't think Claude Design killed menu competitors and I don't think this will too
- bombcar 6mo ago
  It's not wise to build a startup that is just a feature of the product that you're building on. What's even sadder is it can work for way too long.
- BowBun 6mo ago
  I work in a space where one could imagine a Claude replacing our product. I think someone stated it clearly - they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. A lot of processes still require physical steps and backstops because it's not possible to source all the data needed to act on it in the first place. Then you have audits and reconciliations, a bunch of strict workflow rules and atomicity to reach levels of software that bigger financial institutions would accept. My gut reaction to stuff like this is a mix of "oh shit, they could take over my company" and "they're the next script kiddy that thinks software is anywhere near a majority of the work in some software spaces".
  - bix6 6mo ago
    > they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. Yes they can? They have infinite more cash to pay off any risk. What do you need personnel for besides sign off if the AI does it right?
    - stubish 6mo ago
      The personnel also need to take the fall when the AI does it wrong. A judge isn't going to jail Claude, they are going to jail the sucker who unknowingly authorized the fraud. Will Anthropic externalize the risk, selling access to agents? Or will internalize the risk and liability, selling financial services? Maybe both? I guess lots of companies want both, doing some things internally and keeping other things at arms length by outsourcing to 3rd party accountants.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
    - BowBun 5mo ago
      Managing risk is a negotiation across parties, not just ponying up the cash. Personnel completes steps that are still physical requirements, usually by law. I think those are two things Anthropic isn't going to want to get into anytime soon.
- selicos 5mo ago
  Or "rent seeking" type tools/options that should be baked into products from a much earlier point. There was an app for OSX that added window snapping, long before Apple added it to their desktop environment. $5 or something for a free feature that just makes sense to build into your product from the start. Apple is king at absorbing this sort of paid add on, eventually. AI makes that faster.
Havoc 6mo ago
For those in the finance space, are you actually seeing any real AI tools being used? Like for actual operational tasks? I've really only seen it used for research / exploration thus far. Either for economic research slide deck or for exploring trading hypothesis
- iewjj 6mo ago
  Nope If anything firms are pulling back (I know someone closely who works at blackrock).
  - biophysboy 6mo ago
    pulling back as in setting more realistic token budgets, or something more drastic? I'm curious
    - iewjj 6mo ago
      Stopped using them altogether in the context of productivity - in essence they’re useless.
      - roughly 6mo ago
        I can believe that. Gambler’s Ruin gets costly when you’ve actually got money on the line.
  - semiquaver 6mo ago
    I don’t just know someone who works in finance, I am someone who works in finance and I say you’re wrong.
    - iewjj 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - infecto 6mo ago
wxw 6mo ago
> We’re releasing ten ready-to-run agent templates for the most time-consuming work in financial services The templates being: pitch builder, meeting preparer, earnings reviewer, model builder, market researcher, valuation reviewer, general ledger reconciler, month-end closer, statement auditor, KYC (Know Your Customer) screener. Seems pretty scattershot. Reminds me of GPT Store.
- infecto 6mo ago
  Reads different to me. Some examples to go run with and build your own. Covers cases from the investment side and then the obvious ones in an accounting perspective. It would be highly surprising that any of these would be use in production without modification. I am sure it will happen but the intent to me is to take this and run with your own process.
- order-matters 6mo ago
  the details are key here. there is plenty of automatable financial work, sure, but also when it comes to reporting finances/costs (formally or informally) and having a real human being be accountable for them, you REALLY need to trust that nothing is hallucinated. Any idea how they ensure this doesnt happen? As in, how can a user verify that the model did not touch any of the numbers and that it only built pipelines for them. what I've been telling my CFO who wants to get AI involved in things is that for a lot of accounting and finance work "Trust but verify" doesnt work because verify is often the same process as doing the work.
  - infecto 6mo ago
    To be honest I am having a hard time remembering the last time a LLM hallucinated in our pipelines. Make mistakes, sure but not make things up. For a daily recon process this is a solved problem imo.
    - KellyCriterion 6mo ago
      Curious! Could you elaborate a little bit on your pipeline as we are currently looking to solve this for our internal processes in which we have to deal with lots of financial information from outside, containing mass of numbers, like annual reports, bank statements, balance sheets etc.
0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago
patagonia is gonna to lose some clientele
- KellyCriterion 6mo ago
  haha, insider! :-D Just yesterday I told a colleague that he should by some of their vests for his company :-D
axiosgunnar 6mo ago
[dead]
vatsachak 6mo ago
Everything is going to be slop and you're going like it. Is the plan to have an LLM do everything? And do it worse? "Oh yeah my Claude didn't agree with the pitch from their Claude" The goal of current tech is to make humanity a gerbil running on a Claude wheel
- nothinkjustai 6mo ago
  At that point what even is the point of doing anything at all? Like, it’s less than useless.
  - vatsachak 6mo ago
    That is what people like Thiel actually believe, that humanity is just a cradle to bring about a machine god. I don't necessarily disagree with that but doing it through LinkedIn slop companies? Come on man you know better than that
- soupspaces 6mo ago
  Follow the money, until you can't (compute credits)
tencentshill 6mo ago
I don't trust these AI-only companies to be overnight experts in properly handling medical, financial and insurance data. They have no business providing these tools, unless they want to take all the risk too.
- tossandthrow 6mo ago
  I would recommend you to not use these, if you are not willing to absorb the risk. Luckily there is still a significant market for the services.
  - stubish 6mo ago
    Some human always gets to be the certified fall guy for non-compliance. Maybe the legal agent can help structure the company so that is an ignorant lower level accountant and not the CFO. Currently we don't know the risk, so it is kind of hard to absorb.
    - Terr_ 6mo ago
      Decade-old spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE
- areoform 6mo ago
  Claude's actually pretty great at this! I actually used to use Claude A LOT to answer interesting questions (which I'll be writing up on!) More generally, Claude is palpably different from most other agents. I'd recommend these models – especially Opus – without qualifications. But there's a process risk here based on their current practises. I'm hoping those practises change so that I can recommend Claude to everyone I know, but as of now, there's existential risk exposure here that's greater than Google's. Anthropic's automated systems can and will ban you for pretty arbitrary things; and you won't get human support or Claude – even if you are an enterprise paying out of your nose. And there's 0 redressal unless you go viral on social media. Or know someone who knows someone. See: https://x.com/Whizz_ai/status/2051180043355967802 https://x.com/Whizz_ai/status/2051180043355967802 https://x.com/theo/status/2045618854932734260 https://x.com/theo/status/2045618854932734260 And I say that as someone who likes how Anthropic has been training Claude and Opus. I just don't think they're prepared to be the trillion dollar company they've become. They are – in a very real way – suffering from success. Which is extremely inconvenient to be on the receiving end of when you're on a deadline.
jqpabc123 6mo ago
AI and finance --- what could possibly go wrong? Better Call Saul when (not if) it does.
- Ekaros 6mo ago
  Well at that point you can use AI as legal help, right?
  - jqpabc123 6mo ago
    Yes, you can. But expect similar results. https://www.lawnext.com/2025/05/ai-hallucinations-strike-again-two-more-cases-where-lawyers-face-judicial-wrath-for-fake-citations.html https://www.lawnext.com/2025/05/ai-hallucinations-strike-aga...
codemog 6mo ago
Making the most convoluted and idiotic insurance process on earth and then delegating that process onto an AI that requires huge buzzing data centers.. Is there an option to respawn in the non-clown world universe? It was funny at first but it gets tiring eventually.
- jeffreyrogers 6mo ago
  What does a better insurance process look like? Outside of health insurance, which is complicated for a variety of reasons, most insurance is pretty easy to procure. I got an umbrella policy recently and it took about 30 minutes of talking with an agent and answering pretty reasonable questions.
  - codemog 6mo ago
    1. A better insurance process is clearly out of the scope of a hn comment, and I have trouble believing you don’t know that too. 2. I’m almost certainly talking about health insurance, made obvious by you even mentioning that. There’s a HN guideline about discussing in good faith. 3. I find it humorous you hand-wave away our inhuman healthcare system as “for a variety of reasons”. 4. I see your career is in hedge funds, defense, and big tech. Best of luck ;)
    - jeffreyrogers 6mo ago
      I don't think it's obvious that you were talking about health insurance, which I consider fairly distinct from property, casualty, liability, and life insurance, which are all quite large markets in themselves. The reason I made a distinction is because health insurance is quite different from other lines of insurance because healthcare is federally regulated while other insurance is regulated at the state level. As mentioned the problems with the US healthcare system are numerous, complex, and interrelated. I don't think they have a simple solution, nor do I think they are insurance problems at their core. For example the cost of drugs in the US vs the rest of the world has very little to do with insurance.
deleted 6mo ago
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sharadov 6mo ago
Next couple weeks - financial and insurance services announce layoffs!
- KellyCriterion 6mo ago
  There was a paper lately, claiming that bank & insurances are going to layoff around 200k in the next years globally. (which would be according to them a reduction of 3-4% of finance people)
deleted 6mo ago
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dakolli 6mo ago
Why would this be useful in a zero sum environment like markets, why would you want to use the same tool that everyone else has access too? Top performers will always be the people that hand craft their solutions, just like why the top performers in the watch space are the people that make handmade watches in Switzerland not the guys make 100k watches a month in China.
traceroute66 6mo ago
I stopped reading at paragraph one: "ready-to-run agent templates for the most time-consuming work in financial services: building pitchbooks, screening KYC files, and closing the books at month-end" Ok, maybe you can squeeze a vaguely passable pitchbook out of Claude. But screening KYC files or closing books at month-end ? "I'll have some of what they're smoking" as the cool kids say. No regulator or tax office on this planet is going to accept the "but Claude said it was ok" excuse. The only people who are going to profit out of this are Anthropic, Lawyers and Governments (through increased fines).
Lio 6mo ago
Wow, really going for those white collar jobs. This is going to be an interesting few years.
- 23dsfds 6mo ago
  What will happen is what has happened for the past few years: mostly nothing. People employed, things keep trucking forward. LLMs do not change the equation all that much: human's ability to imagine is the most scarce resource on the planet and LLMs will not help all that much with it.
- scottyah 6mo ago
  Just a natural rebalancing of the Rise of the Laptop Class. I think we'll get more productive as the white collar jobs become more efficient, and less days with 8hrs of meetings and responding to emails from people too lazy to look information up themselves.
botacode 6mo ago
Great to see more insurance hype! We've been working on AI to solve the consumer search problem in the industry for the past 3 (almost 4) years and it's great to see the big labs getting their hands dirty and building tools for practitioners in the space. More industry exposure to well-managed agentic experiences will create oodles of opportunities to reduce premiums for consumers and offput some inflation-driven increases in cost of coverage.
guluarte 6mo ago
How long until Anthropic or OpenAI builds an interview platform around AI tools, where candidates build a feature end to end using AI? As someone who has been interviewing lately, I think this is the next step after leetcode and whiteboard style interviews.
simianwords 6mo ago
Does anyone else think "agents" are the wrong abstractions? Agents look like UI wrappers over LLM's - they are inherently not composable. Tailor made agents for UI's don't seem to scale. I predict they wont take off. What I predict instead is that we will have a common UI layer plugin and a "protocol" than can speak to ui elements -- this might be more composable.
prosunpraiser 6mo ago
Of course - finance is the best domain to depkiy a stochastic parrot which hallucinates and forgets stuff frequently and doesn’t follow your instructions - even with SOTA models. One where you need absolute accuracy and auditabikity. Why didn’t I think of that.
- throwpoaster 6mo ago
  Because the l on your keyboard is broken?
dkersten 6mo ago
Given the quality of Claude code lately, I wouldn’t trust them in financial services.
BrandiATMuhkuh 6mo ago
we tried it just before. it's interesting what it does. writing lots of python scripts. however the result (excel/spreadsheet) looks different each time you run it. Which is annoying when you run it at the end of each month. btw: this is not surprising when you look at the low details the skills have.
deleted 6mo ago
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jcims 6mo ago
This is great but as someone in infrastructure tech at a large financial, there is almost no framework for cleanly separating control from data plane operations, read vs write, anything. As of right now you have to build nearly all of that yourself. It feels like juggling pipe bombs and I have a ton of empathy for the teams being pressured by the business to roll them out with no appreciation for the regulatory rat's nest that ensues.
ramchella 6mo ago
[flagged]
anonfunction 6mo ago
I've been doing bias and misaligned behavior research, creating custom private eval suites to test and compare models. Claude Opus 4.7 is heavily biased and presents clear regulatory and reputational risk. It seems the initial product footprint tries to sidestep this problem by not giving the agents control on who to lend to or which applications to approve. Even so I think it's quite an optimistic read on their end. Happy to share reports to anyone who's interested (montana@latentevals.com), especially if you work at a frontier model lab and are interested in plugging my evals into your RL systems!
- scottyah 6mo ago
  Slightly related, I used Opus 4.6 to help me make marketing copy and ideas for my app. It understood the vibe I was going for on my baby-naming app (elation at discovery, curiosity, shared experiences), while 4.7 instantly wanted to pit the couples against each other (really highlighting the he said/she said) and the marketing copy went from "find a name easier" to "Our new feature is great. You're welcome." I can't get it to drop the snarky sass no matter how much I change CLAUDE.md, brand voice, etc. All I did was upgrade claude code and use the new model. It most definitely exhibits misaligned behavior (compared to 4.6)
  - philipkglass 6mo ago
    I tried Opus 4.7 for two days before I started beginning every session with "claude --model claude-opus-4-6". I assume that 4.6 will become unavailable at some point, but I hope not any time soon. 4.7 hit usage limits faster, didn't do anything obviously better, and had more annoying behaviors in other aspects. I don't know if this is strictly a model issue or if there are also problems with how it's harnessed through Claude Code. I'm not willing to spend more time digging into it until I'm forced to.
    - scottyah 6mo ago
      Join me in a petition for them to opensource 4.6 as their first model! It'll be like gemma4 but good enough for all the coding we do.
thepitstop_ai 6mo ago
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dk970 6mo ago
[flagged]
HyperL0gi 6mo ago
Anyone still use claude design? I’ve not seen any mentions on X, here or youtube recently, so wonder if it was all hype or people are actually using it.
- tyyyy3 6mo ago
  Hype
delfugal 6mo ago
Can Agents put Intuit out of business? Asking for a few hundred million Americans tired of their lobbying $$ that killed off IRS direct tax filing.
- milkglass 6mo ago
  Would love to see this
sovenyr 6mo ago
this is to risky as for me!
lpcvoid 6mo ago
AI is like a slow acting poison which spreads and contaminates every industry, until big AI can rent-seek in form of token expenditure while advancing sloppification of everything it touches. I want to get off Mr. Bones wild ride
bharxhav 6mo ago
"agents" Damn, they keep brainwashing people into thinking LLMs are intelligent, meanwhile they be translating into somewhat coherent words and fool the world. When they're right, they polish their intelligence badge. When they're wrong, we prompted incorrectly.
- jesterson 5mo ago
  They employ worst human habits, so no wonder
dzonga 6mo ago
can't wait for 2028/9 - when this AI noise comes down - & the harvester comes for their share. by then A.I would've proved its impact or 0 impact on the economy & numbers will be the only thing to show not potential.

257 points by louiereederson 6mo ago

Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? This probably killed a thousand startups in this space. in the early internet you wouldn't see google creating their own news site or facebook building their own animal farm. what happened to platformication of everything?

iewjj 6mo ago
lol these agents are missing the point re. What people actually do in these jobs. This is an attempt to inflate token generation to fool people into increasing anthropic’s valuation.
gwerbin 6mo ago
> Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? No, why would they if they have the choice? > what happened to platformication of everything? Business happened. The web works differently from how it used to. The users are different. LLM inference and AI tools is a different core product from search and ads. That, and we have the benefit of hindsight now. Maybe a Google newsroom would've actually been a good idea in 2006 in hindsight, who knows. Also realistically you could say the same thing about Google Maps and Street View. That probably also killed some startups. Google isn't running a charity for startups.
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  I guess the argument is that a tool built by a company with actual insight into and focus for financial services, with Anthropic as inference provider, would lead to more adoption and more use of Anthropic models. Something Anthropic could achieve either by just leaving things alone and having the best models, or alternatively by starting some kind of incubator or something. AWS might be a good model The issue with that is obviously that most of the generated value would be captured by that company in the middle, while Anthropic would stay in the cost-conscious inference market.
  - noitpmeder 6mo ago
    Why would anthropic at all prefer this approach when that middle man can switch and cost-arbitrage between countless other model providers. We're not talking about what is best for the consumer (ex more competition to force iterations and improvements), but what Anthropic thinks is best for Anthropic.
    - wongarsu 6mo ago
      Make up the lower margins by larger volume because you get much better market penetration. But you are right that this only works if you know the middle-men don't go to other model providers. That's where some kind of incubation program that provides capital or credits or whatever in return for long-term commitments might work But I doubt staying a pure model provider is a winning move. It's a market nobody will win long-term. Almost all of the value to be captured isn't in inference APIs but in how to use them to generate business value. Claude Code was already the right approach, they "just" need to show they can repeat this for other kinds of tasks
      - khuey 6mo ago
        > Almost all of the value to be captured isn't in inference APIs but in how to use them to generate business value. If the business value can be generated with a few thousand words in a SKILL.md on top of a commoditized model it doesn't sound like that's a market anyone can win long-term either, and the business value is ultimately going to accrue elsewhere (the customer, the inference hardware provider, etc)
- ctoth 6mo ago
  I'm confused because I remember using Google News in 2006?
  - suriya-ganesh 6mo ago
    there has been a product called Google News since 2002. It was only aggregating information from news channels
- anon373839 6mo ago
  This was their play all along with their unethical data collection practices: let others use the APIs to discover the applications, then use the data against them to offer integrated solutions in every vertical of interest. Cursor, once Anthropic’s biggest customer, was one of the early ones they screwed. They are also fighting for their lives because these insane valuations simply aren’t justified by being dumb pipes. Fortunately, open weights models are widely available and have crossed a threshold of usefulness that cements their place as good substitutes.
  - csoups14 6mo ago
    Amazon Basics for Knowledge Work™
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
colesantiago 6mo ago
> Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? Unfortunately no. The TAM for Anthropic and OpenAI is anything that runs software or a screen. Any software or technology business that has high margins that Anthropic and OpenAI are not doing will be a target. After both their IPO's mandates Wall Street them to push for more growth by competing in other technology business areas or they will get punished in the markets. It is ROI or bust.
mobattah 6mo ago
This is premature caution/fear.
_fizz_buzz_ 6mo ago
But Google did move into a lot of spaces: maps, mail, docs, etc.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
ambicapter 6mo ago
> in the early internet you wouldn't see google creating their own news site Google News was definitely a thing (and actually still exists).
- landian66 6mo ago
  just looked up, it is still a thing - learn something new everyday!
- suriya-ganesh 6mo ago
  it's been a things since 2002. but it's a news aggregator not directly competing with newyork times
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
bcrosby95 6mo ago
Building a startup on an LLM is like building a house on a foundation of quicksand. As the LLM gets better it naturally erodes your moat. It's a completely different dynamic compared to the internet. It's why I'm watching this from the sidelines.
- intrasight 6mo ago
  Building a business on top of any SaaS platform is building on quicksand. I know that from experience.
- PyWoody 6mo ago
  I have a close friend who is trying to build a company entirely on top of Claude. He doesn't know how to program. He can't do basic arithmetic. Yet, the company he's building is a "Data Science AI for the Government" because, according to him, all of the data scientists at NOAA don't know what they're doing. I have given up on trying to get through to him how bad of an idea this is. He's unemployed and has been working on this for over a year.
  - blitzar 6mo ago
    Sounds like YC material. Y Combinator is accepting applications for the Summer 2026 Batch funding cycle. Make sure they don't miss out!
  - edm0nd 6mo ago
    Yeah that's the scary part about these coding LLMs. Before, some idiot would pitch their stupid idea to dozens of local webdev companies and banks and get told dozens of times their idea is straight up stupid and never going to work and they are stupid. Now these LLMs allows them to bypass all of that advice and create what they want without any input or even knowing how the tech behind it works. We are so fucked lol
  - ecshafer 6mo ago
    Scientists are pretty solid overall for the Government. Lots of Phds that decide to take the steady reliable income and solid benefits over the risk of Academia for a few post docs hoping for a professor job.
tyre 6mo ago
You’re advocating for less competition? AI startup valuations are out of control. People are raising $20m seed rounds. If you can’t prove PMF and differentiation with $10m, I’m sorry but you’re not a serious enterprise. And if what you’re building is “pitch deck AI”, I mean, come on.
robotswantdata 6mo ago
History suggests otherwise. railroads, telecoms, search all consolidated. The natural equilibrium for transformative infrastructure is winner take all. AGI/ASI won’t be different but will be nearly every vertical and governments will legislate too little too late.
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  local models are going to win and therefore the hardware providers, Apple and nvidia. There isn't going to be any moat for the hosted providers besides hardware scale. They can run your request on shared 1TB memory hardware, or whatever. But local hardware is going to catch up, the hosted providers are going to become commoditized, and the costs are just going to be compute whether its your hardware or theirs. And your laptop is going to be powerful enough to be good enough for most cases.
  - robotswantdata 6mo ago
    Local hardware catching up doesn’t matter if the thing worth having never leaves the building. Enterprise services are hard, moat is in distribution and know how.
    - colechristensen 6mo ago
      >if the thing worth having never leaves the building Not sure what you're referring to, the models?
- agentultra 6mo ago
  Nothing natural about it. Such monopolies were propped up by the state using public funds and profits captured by the capital class. Many benefitted by the arrangement and so it became normalized. But it’s a choice people made to structure things that way. The car industry, oil and gas… all could have played out differently if different players had gained wider adoption or if governments used a different economic model.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
debarshri 6mo ago
I am not sure if people are using claude design, security review stuff and other tools they have built so far. Building is the easy part. There are lot of service level stuff that I am sure anthropic will not be able to provide, therefore they are trying to partner with other orgs in that realm. I am very skeptical about their stuff now. If you are builder, I believe you should avoid anthropic, it can be default to monopolistic behavior, I am not saying they are doing it, but they could, where in they see what you are building, if you have traction, position a product in that realm. Just saying.
vatsachak 6mo ago
> tfw you've been huffing your own copium so much that you forgot you're selling shovels
sokoloff 6mo ago
I'm not sure if this was tongue-in-cheek or not, but Yahoo created its own news site in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_News and FB had Zynga's Farmville as well.
- lordgrenville 6mo ago
  I think OP meant that Farmville was built by a different party (Zynga). FB was trying to encourage other businesses to build apps on its platform, not build them itself.
_pdp_ 6mo ago
> Will the big labs leave anything for external competition? Is this a serious question? Without the big labs with deep pockets investing to change the consumer mindset do you think a small company with no funding has any chance of even existing? I remember when paying $1.99 for a mobile game on iOS was considered too expensive and now it seem most consumers are primed to spend more on in-app purchases every week. That mind-shift did not happen overnight. It was not that long ago $200 for ChatGPT subscription was considered extravagant but now even wrappers can charge this price without hesitation - some of them do. What Anthropic is doing is priming the market of which they will be potentially one of the main beneficiaries as long as they can continue existing. But I don't think anyone will go to Anthropic directly to source their financial services agent. They will go to financial service companies that use Anthropic to build the capabilities.
SoftTalker 6mo ago
Why control part of the world when you can control it all? Less cynically, you might say that "use AI to do <obvious thing>" is not really a viable startup pitch anymore. That's not necessarily bad.
owebmaster 6mo ago
I don't think Claude Design killed menu competitors and I don't think this will too
bombcar 6mo ago
It's not wise to build a startup that is just a feature of the product that you're building on. What's even sadder is it can work for way too long.
BowBun 6mo ago
I work in a space where one could imagine a Claude replacing our product. I think someone stated it clearly - they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. A lot of processes still require physical steps and backstops because it's not possible to source all the data needed to act on it in the first place. Then you have audits and reconciliations, a bunch of strict workflow rules and atomicity to reach levels of software that bigger financial institutions would accept. My gut reaction to stuff like this is a mix of "oh shit, they could take over my company" and "they're the next script kiddy that thinks software is anywhere near a majority of the work in some software spaces".
- bix6 6mo ago
  > they can't take on these kinds of businesses until they build out the risk side and the personnel, all of which is a human problem not a tech one. Yes they can? They have infinite more cash to pay off any risk. What do you need personnel for besides sign off if the AI does it right?
  - stubish 6mo ago
    The personnel also need to take the fall when the AI does it wrong. A judge isn't going to jail Claude, they are going to jail the sucker who unknowingly authorized the fraud. Will Anthropic externalize the risk, selling access to agents? Or will internalize the risk and liability, selling financial services? Maybe both? I guess lots of companies want both, doing some things internally and keeping other things at arms length by outsourcing to 3rd party accountants.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - BowBun 5mo ago
    Managing risk is a negotiation across parties, not just ponying up the cash. Personnel completes steps that are still physical requirements, usually by law. I think those are two things Anthropic isn't going to want to get into anytime soon.
selicos 5mo ago
Or "rent seeking" type tools/options that should be baked into products from a much earlier point. There was an app for OSX that added window snapping, long before Apple added it to their desktop environment. $5 or something for a free feature that just makes sense to build into your product from the start. Apple is king at absorbing this sort of paid add on, eventually. AI makes that faster.

Havoc 6mo ago

For those in the finance space, are you actually seeing any real AI tools being used? Like for actual operational tasks? I've really only seen it used for research / exploration thus far. Either for economic research slide deck or for exploring trading hypothesis

iewjj 6mo ago
Nope If anything firms are pulling back (I know someone closely who works at blackrock).
- biophysboy 6mo ago
  pulling back as in setting more realistic token budgets, or something more drastic? I'm curious
  - iewjj 6mo ago
    Stopped using them altogether in the context of productivity - in essence they’re useless.
    - roughly 6mo ago
      I can believe that. Gambler’s Ruin gets costly when you’ve actually got money on the line.
- semiquaver 6mo ago
  I don’t just know someone who works in finance, I am someone who works in finance and I say you’re wrong.
  - iewjj 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - infecto 6mo ago

wxw 6mo ago

> We’re releasing ten ready-to-run agent templates for the most time-consuming work in financial services The templates being: pitch builder, meeting preparer, earnings reviewer, model builder, market researcher, valuation reviewer, general ledger reconciler, month-end closer, statement auditor, KYC (Know Your Customer) screener. Seems pretty scattershot. Reminds me of GPT Store.

infecto 6mo ago
Reads different to me. Some examples to go run with and build your own. Covers cases from the investment side and then the obvious ones in an accounting perspective. It would be highly surprising that any of these would be use in production without modification. I am sure it will happen but the intent to me is to take this and run with your own process.
order-matters 6mo ago
the details are key here. there is plenty of automatable financial work, sure, but also when it comes to reporting finances/costs (formally or informally) and having a real human being be accountable for them, you REALLY need to trust that nothing is hallucinated. Any idea how they ensure this doesnt happen? As in, how can a user verify that the model did not touch any of the numbers and that it only built pipelines for them. what I've been telling my CFO who wants to get AI involved in things is that for a lot of accounting and finance work "Trust but verify" doesnt work because verify is often the same process as doing the work.
- infecto 6mo ago
  To be honest I am having a hard time remembering the last time a LLM hallucinated in our pipelines. Make mistakes, sure but not make things up. For a daily recon process this is a solved problem imo.
  - KellyCriterion 6mo ago
    Curious! Could you elaborate a little bit on your pipeline as we are currently looking to solve this for our internal processes in which we have to deal with lots of financial information from outside, containing mass of numbers, like annual reports, bank statements, balance sheets etc.

0123456789ABCDE 6mo ago

patagonia is gonna to lose some clientele

KellyCriterion 6mo ago
haha, insider! :-D Just yesterday I told a colleague that he should by some of their vests for his company :-D

axiosgunnar 6mo ago

[dead]

vatsachak 6mo ago

Everything is going to be slop and you're going like it. Is the plan to have an LLM do everything? And do it worse? "Oh yeah my Claude didn't agree with the pitch from their Claude" The goal of current tech is to make humanity a gerbil running on a Claude wheel

nothinkjustai 6mo ago
At that point what even is the point of doing anything at all? Like, it’s less than useless.
- vatsachak 6mo ago
  That is what people like Thiel actually believe, that humanity is just a cradle to bring about a machine god. I don't necessarily disagree with that but doing it through LinkedIn slop companies? Come on man you know better than that
soupspaces 6mo ago
Follow the money, until you can't (compute credits)

tencentshill 6mo ago

I don't trust these AI-only companies to be overnight experts in properly handling medical, financial and insurance data. They have no business providing these tools, unless they want to take all the risk too.

tossandthrow 6mo ago
I would recommend you to not use these, if you are not willing to absorb the risk. Luckily there is still a significant market for the services.
- stubish 6mo ago
  Some human always gets to be the certified fall guy for non-compliance. Maybe the legal agent can help structure the company so that is an ignorant lower level accountant and not the CFO. Currently we don't know the risk, so it is kind of hard to absorb.
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    Decade-old spoilers for "How I Met Your Mother" ... but there's a character who has that kind of job, as a legal meat-shield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u62HptZ6TE
areoform 6mo ago
Claude's actually pretty great at this! I actually used to use Claude A LOT to answer interesting questions (which I'll be writing up on!) More generally, Claude is palpably different from most other agents. I'd recommend these models – especially Opus – without qualifications. But there's a process risk here based on their current practises. I'm hoping those practises change so that I can recommend Claude to everyone I know, but as of now, there's existential risk exposure here that's greater than Google's. Anthropic's automated systems can and will ban you for pretty arbitrary things; and you won't get human support or Claude – even if you are an enterprise paying out of your nose. And there's 0 redressal unless you go viral on social media. Or know someone who knows someone. See: https://x.com/Whizz_ai/status/2051180043355967802 https://x.com/Whizz_ai/status/2051180043355967802 https://x.com/theo/status/2045618854932734260 https://x.com/theo/status/2045618854932734260 And I say that as someone who likes how Anthropic has been training Claude and Opus. I just don't think they're prepared to be the trillion dollar company they've become. They are – in a very real way – suffering from success. Which is extremely inconvenient to be on the receiving end of when you're on a deadline.

jqpabc123 6mo ago

AI and finance --- what could possibly go wrong? Better Call Saul when (not if) it does.

Ekaros 6mo ago
Well at that point you can use AI as legal help, right?
- jqpabc123 6mo ago
  Yes, you can. But expect similar results. https://www.lawnext.com/2025/05/ai-hallucinations-strike-again-two-more-cases-where-lawyers-face-judicial-wrath-for-fake-citations.html https://www.lawnext.com/2025/05/ai-hallucinations-strike-aga...

codemog 6mo ago

Making the most convoluted and idiotic insurance process on earth and then delegating that process onto an AI that requires huge buzzing data centers.. Is there an option to respawn in the non-clown world universe? It was funny at first but it gets tiring eventually.

jeffreyrogers 6mo ago
What does a better insurance process look like? Outside of health insurance, which is complicated for a variety of reasons, most insurance is pretty easy to procure. I got an umbrella policy recently and it took about 30 minutes of talking with an agent and answering pretty reasonable questions.
- codemog 6mo ago
  1. A better insurance process is clearly out of the scope of a hn comment, and I have trouble believing you don’t know that too. 2. I’m almost certainly talking about health insurance, made obvious by you even mentioning that. There’s a HN guideline about discussing in good faith. 3. I find it humorous you hand-wave away our inhuman healthcare system as “for a variety of reasons”. 4. I see your career is in hedge funds, defense, and big tech. Best of luck ;)
  - jeffreyrogers 6mo ago
    I don't think it's obvious that you were talking about health insurance, which I consider fairly distinct from property, casualty, liability, and life insurance, which are all quite large markets in themselves. The reason I made a distinction is because health insurance is quite different from other lines of insurance because healthcare is federally regulated while other insurance is regulated at the state level. As mentioned the problems with the US healthcare system are numerous, complex, and interrelated. I don't think they have a simple solution, nor do I think they are insurance problems at their core. For example the cost of drugs in the US vs the rest of the world has very little to do with insurance.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

sharadov 6mo ago

Next couple weeks - financial and insurance services announce layoffs!

KellyCriterion 6mo ago
There was a paper lately, claiming that bank & insurances are going to layoff around 200k in the next years globally. (which would be according to them a reduction of 3-4% of finance people)

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

dakolli 6mo ago

Why would this be useful in a zero sum environment like markets, why would you want to use the same tool that everyone else has access too? Top performers will always be the people that hand craft their solutions, just like why the top performers in the watch space are the people that make handmade watches in Switzerland not the guys make 100k watches a month in China.

traceroute66 6mo ago

I stopped reading at paragraph one: "ready-to-run agent templates for the most time-consuming work in financial services: building pitchbooks, screening KYC files, and closing the books at month-end" Ok, maybe you can squeeze a vaguely passable pitchbook out of Claude. But screening KYC files or closing books at month-end ? "I'll have some of what they're smoking" as the cool kids say. No regulator or tax office on this planet is going to accept the "but Claude said it was ok" excuse. The only people who are going to profit out of this are Anthropic, Lawyers and Governments (through increased fines).

Lio 6mo ago

Wow, really going for those white collar jobs. This is going to be an interesting few years.

23dsfds 6mo ago
What will happen is what has happened for the past few years: mostly nothing. People employed, things keep trucking forward. LLMs do not change the equation all that much: human's ability to imagine is the most scarce resource on the planet and LLMs will not help all that much with it.
scottyah 6mo ago
Just a natural rebalancing of the Rise of the Laptop Class. I think we'll get more productive as the white collar jobs become more efficient, and less days with 8hrs of meetings and responding to emails from people too lazy to look information up themselves.

botacode 6mo ago

Great to see more insurance hype! We've been working on AI to solve the consumer search problem in the industry for the past 3 (almost 4) years and it's great to see the big labs getting their hands dirty and building tools for practitioners in the space. More industry exposure to well-managed agentic experiences will create oodles of opportunities to reduce premiums for consumers and offput some inflation-driven increases in cost of coverage.

guluarte 6mo ago

How long until Anthropic or OpenAI builds an interview platform around AI tools, where candidates build a feature end to end using AI? As someone who has been interviewing lately, I think this is the next step after leetcode and whiteboard style interviews.

simianwords 6mo ago

Does anyone else think "agents" are the wrong abstractions? Agents look like UI wrappers over LLM's - they are inherently not composable. Tailor made agents for UI's don't seem to scale. I predict they wont take off. What I predict instead is that we will have a common UI layer plugin and a "protocol" than can speak to ui elements -- this might be more composable.

prosunpraiser 6mo ago

Of course - finance is the best domain to depkiy a stochastic parrot which hallucinates and forgets stuff frequently and doesn’t follow your instructions - even with SOTA models. One where you need absolute accuracy and auditabikity. Why didn’t I think of that.

throwpoaster 6mo ago
Because the l on your keyboard is broken?

dkersten 6mo ago

Given the quality of Claude code lately, I wouldn’t trust them in financial services.

BrandiATMuhkuh 6mo ago

we tried it just before. it's interesting what it does. writing lots of python scripts. however the result (excel/spreadsheet) looks different each time you run it. Which is annoying when you run it at the end of each month. btw: this is not surprising when you look at the low details the skills have.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

jcims 6mo ago

This is great but as someone in infrastructure tech at a large financial, there is almost no framework for cleanly separating control from data plane operations, read vs write, anything. As of right now you have to build nearly all of that yourself. It feels like juggling pipe bombs and I have a ton of empathy for the teams being pressured by the business to roll them out with no appreciation for the regulatory rat's nest that ensues.

ramchella 6mo ago

[flagged]

anonfunction 6mo ago

I've been doing bias and misaligned behavior research, creating custom private eval suites to test and compare models. Claude Opus 4.7 is heavily biased and presents clear regulatory and reputational risk. It seems the initial product footprint tries to sidestep this problem by not giving the agents control on who to lend to or which applications to approve. Even so I think it's quite an optimistic read on their end. Happy to share reports to anyone who's interested (montana@latentevals.com), especially if you work at a frontier model lab and are interested in plugging my evals into your RL systems!

scottyah 6mo ago
Slightly related, I used Opus 4.6 to help me make marketing copy and ideas for my app. It understood the vibe I was going for on my baby-naming app (elation at discovery, curiosity, shared experiences), while 4.7 instantly wanted to pit the couples against each other (really highlighting the he said/she said) and the marketing copy went from "find a name easier" to "Our new feature is great. You're welcome." I can't get it to drop the snarky sass no matter how much I change CLAUDE.md, brand voice, etc. All I did was upgrade claude code and use the new model. It most definitely exhibits misaligned behavior (compared to 4.6)
- philipkglass 6mo ago
  I tried Opus 4.7 for two days before I started beginning every session with "claude --model claude-opus-4-6". I assume that 4.6 will become unavailable at some point, but I hope not any time soon. 4.7 hit usage limits faster, didn't do anything obviously better, and had more annoying behaviors in other aspects. I don't know if this is strictly a model issue or if there are also problems with how it's harnessed through Claude Code. I'm not willing to spend more time digging into it until I'm forced to.
  - scottyah 6mo ago
    Join me in a petition for them to opensource 4.6 as their first model! It'll be like gemma4 but good enough for all the coding we do.

thepitstop_ai 6mo ago

[dead]

dk970 6mo ago

[flagged]

HyperL0gi 6mo ago

Anyone still use claude design? I’ve not seen any mentions on X, here or youtube recently, so wonder if it was all hype or people are actually using it.

tyyyy3 6mo ago
Hype

delfugal 6mo ago

Can Agents put Intuit out of business? Asking for a few hundred million Americans tired of their lobbying $$ that killed off IRS direct tax filing.

milkglass 6mo ago
Would love to see this

sovenyr 6mo ago

this is to risky as for me!

lpcvoid 6mo ago

AI is like a slow acting poison which spreads and contaminates every industry, until big AI can rent-seek in form of token expenditure while advancing sloppification of everything it touches. I want to get off Mr. Bones wild ride

bharxhav 6mo ago

"agents" Damn, they keep brainwashing people into thinking LLMs are intelligent, meanwhile they be translating into somewhat coherent words and fool the world. When they're right, they polish their intelligence badge. When they're wrong, we prompted incorrectly.

jesterson 5mo ago
They employ worst human habits, so no wonder

dzonga 6mo ago

can't wait for 2028/9 - when this AI noise comes down - & the harvester comes for their share. by then A.I would've proved its impact or 0 impact on the economy & numbers will be the only thing to show not potential.