Barclays to cut 5,000 jobs, developers included, citing AI

A big bank just named developers among the jobs AI is helping it cut.

Barclays plans to cut about 5,000 roles, roughly 5% of its workforce, by the end of 2026, Euronews reported as the bank released its third-quarter results on Oct. 22. About 60% of the cuts fall on support functions, developers among them.

The cuts, and what Barclays says drives them

About 1,000 of the roles were already gone in the first half of the year, per Euronews and Silicon Republic. The rest go by year end.

Barclays describes the program as "organisational simplification and technology change efficiency driven by AI," Euronews reports.

Chief financial officer Anna Cross told analysts the changes in the third and fourth quarters are "sizable," according to Bloomberg as cited by Silicon Republic. "They relate both to the simplification of the organisation and to some of the impacts that we're starting to see from AI," she said.

The bank is not cutting from weakness. Profit attributable to shareholders rose to £1.65 billion in the quarter from £1.46 billion a year earlier, per Euronews.

Developers are on the list for a reason

Read Cross's sentence again. Two causes, and AI is the second one.

That matters. The cuts sit inside a three-year cost plan that is nearing its end, Silicon Republic notes. AI is part of the story.

Still, developers are named. Barclays is also putting coding agents in front of its engineers. In early October it set a target of 50% adoption of Claude Code among its developers by the end of 2026, and a majority of its software engineers by 2027, FF News reported. More than 16,000 Barclays staff already use a Claude-powered internal assistant, per the same report.

Put those two facts side by side. A bank pushing agentic coding to half its developers is also cutting developer roles. It has not said one caused the other. It does not have to for you to notice.

What it means if you write code at a big company

The metric your employer is watching is adoption. Barclays published its target. Yours probably has one too, even if nobody said it out loud.

If you are a developer, get good at the agents now, and be the person who reviews and ships what they write. The work that survives is the judgment around the code: the design, the review, the call on what not to build.

If you manage engineers, expect to be asked what your team can ship with fewer people. Have a real answer, with numbers from your own team, before someone else supplies one.

What to watch

Watch Barclays' full-year results for how many of the 5,000 cuts it ties to AI, and whether the developer share grows into 2027, when it wants most of its engineers on Claude Code.

Then watch the other banks. Barclays said the quiet part on an earnings call. It will not be the last.