* Anthropic launches 10 AI agents for finance tasks like

pitchbooks and audits

* CEO Dario Amodei predicts AI could make indvidual SaaS

firms 'go bust'

* Financial sector now Anthropic's second-largest source

of enterprise revenue

By Jeffrey Dastin and Kenneth Li

NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) - Artificial-intelligence lab

Anthropic is diving deeper into the financial services industry,

releasing tools on Tuesday that can speed up myriad tasks for

banks and insurers while CEO Dario Amodei predicted further

software disruption.

Pegged to a New York event hosted by Anthropic, the startup

launched 10 financially focused agents, or AI programs that

​carry out tasks with limited human intervention. These include

agents that can build a pitchbook, audit statements or draft

credit memos, Anthropic said.

The company also announced new data sources that its

so-called Claude AI can access to do financial work.

Hardly a year into unveiling ambitions to tailor AI for

finance, Anthropic has rapidly expanded its business, with

adoption by Goldman Sachs ( GS ), Visa, Citi, AIG

and others. Some 40% of Anthropic's top 50 customers are

financial institutions, and the industry represents its

second-largest by enterprise revenue after technology clients,

Anthropic said.

Speaking from the stage at the packed event, Amodei said

Anthropic's revenue in the first quarter had grown "80x" on an

annualized basis. A later slide presentation also stated:

"Coding has changed forever. Finance is next," referring to the

rise of AI-powered programming, a domain led by Anthropic.

Already, for instance, banks have been scrambling to access

Anthropic's Claude Mythos model to shore up their cybersecurity.

Amodei said Mythos had probably found tens of thousands of

vulnerabilities across industries so far and that there should

be legislation, or rules, on the release of powerful AI models.

SOFTWARE FIRMS MAY 'GO BUST'

Amodei appeared onstage in a joint interview with Jamie

Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase ( JPM ). Asked

about AI's impact on jobs, Dimon said that technology would

improve lives and that its negative impacts were also "a

legitimate concern."

The Anthropic CEO had a stark forecast for software

disruption.

For months, Anthropic's drive to automate enterprise work has

hammered an array of software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, due to

anticipation that the AI provider could supplant their

businesses. The San Francisco-based startup has said it wants to

improve outcomes for customers, rather than replace them.

Amodei said at the event that AI is making software

development cheaper and will cause the industry to grow overall.

However, he said, "I don't know what will happen to the group of

today's SaaS incumbents." The companies that address AI head-on

can do better than ever, while others may "lose market value, go

bankrupt, completely go bust," he said.

In an earlier Reuters interview, Nicholas Lin, who leads

Anthropic's financial services product work, said an

increasingly capable Claude would develop "vertical-specific

intelligence," for instance in finance, even as the startup's AI

is widely applicable across industries.

AI model advances, coupled with hands-on customer support

and key office software integrations, were underpinning the

rapid uptick in Anthropic's financial services business, said

Lin.

As part of its product announcement, Anthropic said its 10

new AI agents could plug in to its Claude Code and Cowork

software out of the box, and could be customized to a firm's

policies and style.