Bloomberg, the OG of financial data firms, has a potent new AI agent. How it built it holds lessons for other companies

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…China blocks Meta’s purchase of Manus…OpenAI falls short of its revenue and growth targets…Anthropic shows AI models can help advance AI safety research…Sen. Bernie Sanders’s decision to invite Chinese AI experts to a Capitol Hill panel provokes China hawks’ ire.

In their battle for enterprise sales, both OpenAI and Anthropic have been targeting financial services firms. That’s not surprising. As that old joke about why criminals rob banks says: It’s where the money is. OpenAI supposedly has a battalion of ex-investment analysts helping to build a yet-to-be-launched agentic AI financial analysis product. Anthropic has been rolling out financial modeling skills for its Claude Code, Cowork, and Claude for Finance products. Startup Samaya AI is building AI tools for the finance sector too. And there are plenty of new financial advisory tools using AI as well, as my colleague Jeff John Roberts has covered in this informative recent feature.

The OG of specialized financial data and analysis tools, of course, is Bloomberg. Access to the company’s “terminal,” as it calls its core product (even though its data is no longer delivered through a dedicated machine), is still considered the de rigueur tool of every trader, investment banker, and hedge fund quant.

Bloomberg’s tools have seen o...