Anthropic's new AI tool: Next black stock market day for the software industry
The downward trend for the software industry in the financial markets continues: A new AI tool from Anthropic has likely caused the next major sell-off.
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The introduction of new AI tools for working on legal documents by Anthropic has renewed concerns about the competitiveness of software and financial companies on the stock market, triggering another sell-off. For Adobe and Salesforce, a price decline of about 7 percent each was not as severe as for companies offering tools for legal document work, some of which ended up more than 10 percent down. PayPal's stock plunged by more than 20 percent. The payment service provider's business figures disappointed shareholders, and the introduction of a new CEO was also not well received. Meanwhile, Bitcoin continued its downward trend: the most important cryptocurrency currently costs around 76,000 US dollars.
According to observers, the sell-off was triggered by the introduction of new features for Anthropic's AI agent “Cowork.” This has been causing software company stock prices to tumble for weeks as the conviction grows on the stock markets that the often-promised productivity leap through AI is becoming a reality. Specifically, Anthropic has now announced that it could automate the review of contracts and non-disclosure agreements, as well as workflows for compliance documents and legal templates. As a result, prices of companies that have supplied the tools for this so far first plummeted, and the sell-off later spread to the software and financial sectors.
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The total stock market drop of 285 billion US dollars has once again hit an industry that is already under immense pressure in the financial markets. Salesforce's stock has halved within a year, and Adobe has seen a minus of 45 percent in the same period. Microsoft also fell another three percent on Tuesday; the software giant's shares have lost more than 13 percent in five days. The software group shocked the financial markets last week with the admission that more money is being spent on building AI infrastructure than expected, while the associated cloud growth is lagging expectations. Furthermore, last week Google's introduction of a new AI tool caused gaming industry stocks to plummet.
(mho)
