Anthropic suggests AI might be worse for hedge fund employees than bankers

Banks are still relying on their trusty analysts to build powerpoints and financial models, but will that change as AI becomes more capable? Anthropic, developers of the AI chatbot Claude, seems to think the rumors of the death of financial services jobs are greatly exaggerated. Some of them, at least...

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In a report on the labour market published by Anthropic this week, the AI lab looked at the theoretical exposure of various industries to AI and compared it to the observed exposure it had seen by users of Claude. 'Business and finance' jobs are, theoretically, some of the most exposed jobs, but Anthropic's perceived impact is less than a third of what's actually possible.

Source: Anthropic

Indeed, Anthropic suggests pretty much all industries are using AI less than they theoretically can. One of the biggest disparities between theory and practice is for management jobs, which presumably overlaps with senior banking jobs somewhat.

Not all jobs in finance are safe. Investment analysts had a perceived exposure of 57.2%, making it the seventh most exposed role to AI that Anthropic assessed. This might suggest that hedge fund staff are more exposed than bankers, especially as major funds build out their own proprietary AI systems that do a lot of the grunt work like analyzing regulatory filings. Equity researchers in banks may have similar cause for concern.

Technology jobs in finance are also at risk; Anthropic observed that computer programmers had an observed exposure of 74.5%. Banking engineers may have seen this coming; as their employers brought out new AI development tools last year, it became popular to measure their output in 'developer hours reduced'.

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