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Comment by fancyfredbot | Hacker News Reader

Goldman is very unlikely to have decided proactively to cut off traders access, and it's much more likely there was an operational loss. What kind of loss? I don't know but consider:

1) Claude Code is only being taken away from traders.

2) Only traders have permission to send orders to the market and book client trades.

3) Claude code would probably have been running as the trader, under their account with minimal review.

If you run a coding agent in that environment it's only a matter of time until it enters a bad order or books a bad trade, and once that happens it's only a matter of time before management decides to take this kind of action.

Goldman is definitely not doing this for cost reasons. They can afford the tokens.

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> Goldman is definitely not doing this for cost reasons. They can afford the tokens.

Well, sure, but if the tokens aren't benefiting them enough to justify the cost it could make sense to do for cost reasons.

Technically yes, but in practice:

a) They are pulling it entirely rather than imposing a cap or enforcing the use of cheaper models. This would be a strange choice if cost was the only concern.

b) Famously, traders at Goldman are well renumerated. Given the costs of these people even small productivity improvements carry a large value.

c) It would be very difficult to determine in any kind of conclusive way that the benefits were smaller than the costs.

For all these reasons I find it totally implausible that this decision was driven by API costs.

Having sat in a trading seat at a GS competitor, I can second this. If a Claude Max subscription led to one better trade over the course of a year, there's an almost 100% chance that it would pay for itself. And consider that a trader at GS would be doing dozens if not thousands of trades per day (depending on the seat/product).

Cost isn't the issue here.

If it was being used for research rather than execution, isn’t there a risk of leaking information therefore inadvertently causing price movements.

Definitely not using something like an Anthropic model for research, FWIW. The amount of data the LLM needs to consume to build context for even simple trade sequence comprehension makes it next to useless.

There are a litany of other mathematical and ML models that can more aptly be applied to the space.

But to answer your question more directly, yeah...there's no way in hell you'd let the questions your traders are asking in research out of the four walls of your building if you can avoid it.

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