Anthropic will provide its Claude AI models to firms participating in the UK Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) second Supercharged Sandbox cohort, as the regulator expands efforts to help financial companies test artificial intelligence applications in a controlled environment.

Participants will receive access to Claude, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork, to develop applications spanning agent-led payments, fraud detection, compliance automation, and AI governance. The second cohort comprises 21 organizations, among them Scottish Widows, Money Advice Trust, and TrueLayer. The initiative underscores the broader competitive push among frontier AI developers—including OpenAI and Google DeepMind—to embed their models within regulated financial workflows, where reliability and compliance constraints are especially stringent.

The FCA said it received 199 applications for the latest group, a 51% increase from the first round, reflecting growing demand for regulated environments where financial firms can experiment with AI systems amid tightening global expectations around AI risk management, including the EU AI Act's phased implementation.

The program builds on the FCA's existing partnerships with NVIDIA and NayaOne, which supply participants with computing infrastructure and development tools. Alongside the second cohort, the regulator also launched a 10-week Agentic Academy in collaboration with the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship, designed to help firms develop and deploy AI agents in financial services.

The Supercharged Sandbox targets firms in the discovery and experimentation phase of AI development. The FCA's separate AI Live Testing program, by contrast, supports firms that are ready to deploy AI in live markets. Insights from the sandbox cohorts may inform the FCA's evolving guidance on safe AI adoption in UK financial services, a sector that contributes significantly to the national economy.

Source: Cointelegraph