Shares of some software companies worldwide plummeted in recent days after Anthropic unveiled an artificial intelligence tool viewed by some investors as a potential replacement for widely-used enterprise products.
The selloff came in response to a set of new plugins for a digital tool called Claude Cowork, an AI-fueled workplace assistant that can author documents and organize files. The plugins, released on Friday, allow customers to adapt the tool for narrow sectors like legal, finance or data marketing.
Thomson Reuters, a data and services firm, and legal-tech company Legalzoom.com each fell more than 15% on Tuesday. Double-digit drops also befell RELX, the London-based parent company of data-analytics firm LexisNexis, and financial-data company FactSet.
Shares of major enterprise-software companies Salesforce and Workday also declined earlier this week.
Most of those companies recovered a portion of their losses on Wednesday, but all remained below where they stood at the outset of the week.
The turmoil comes amid a years-long run of stock market gains buoyed by enthusiasm about AI, though some analysts have voiced concern about the risk of an AI bubble.
Analysts who spoke to ABC News agreed that the selloff in software firms indicated a perceived threat to established products in the sector. But they differed about the whether the new AI tool poses a risk of an imminent shake up in the enterprise-software business. Some analysts said it’s too early to tell.
Jim Reid, a research strategist at Deutsche Bank, said the market’s tailspin exemplified a months-long trend of heightened competition for favor from investors over AI.
“Over the last few months, the market has clearly shifted from the ‘every tech stock is a winner’ mindset to something far more brutal: a true winners and losers landscape,” Reid noted in a memo to clients on Wednesday.
Reid referred to a memo he wrote in October, in which he warned: “AI is likely to be transformative,” but “identifying the long-term winners and losers at this early stage is close to pure guesswork.”
In turn, Reid said at the time, investors would likely “see plenty of volatility this year as market sentiment swung on this.”
In this Jan. 23, 2025, file photo, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looks on as he takes part in a session on AI during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei forecast that an economic earthquake may be set off by AI. Last June, Amodei told Axios the technology could cut U.S. entry-level jobs by half within five years.
In a blog post in October, Amodei touted the potential capacity of AI at work, saying it can “be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary.”
Anthropic did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Entry-level tasks in white collar professions stand at risk from AI, some analysts previously told ABC News, pointing to the technology’s ability to perform written and computational tasks as opposed to manual work.
Vasant Dhar, a professor of data science at New York University who studies AI, said rudimentary legal services amount to “low-hanging fruit” for possible disruption.
“You go to a lawyer and they charge you thousands of dollars for boiler-plate stuff,” Dhar said. “Reviewing standard contacts isn’t a big deal.”
Some analysts voiced skepticism about the potential impact of the AI advance, however.
“It’s a strong model and it’s extremely impressive. But I do not see enterprises moving away from traditional vendors because of this,” Dan Ives, a managing director of equity research at investment firm Wedbush, told ABC News.
Ives pointed to the difficulty scaling up enterprise AI tools for use at large companies with thousands of employees, who’ve developed processes using other products.
“You can’t just snap your fingers and go to an AI model on an enterprise scale,” Ives said.
Despite disagreement about the ultimate adoption of Anthropic’s tool, analysts acknowledged the turmoil in markets this week.
Ed Yardeni, the president of market advisory firm Yardeni Research and former chief investment strategist at Deutsche Bank’s U.S. equities division, said software stocks had been “hard hit” by the Anthropic plugins but he emphasized ambiguity regarding their long-term impact.
“It’s too soon to tell how useful the new tools will be,” Yardeni said in a memo this week.