Shares of some software companies around the world have fallen in recent days after Anthropic unveiled a artificial intelligence tool seen by some investors as a potential replacement for widely used enterprise products.
The sale came in response to a set of new plugins for a digital tool called Claude Cowork, a AI-powered work assistant which can create documents and organize files. The plugins, released Friday, allow customers to adapt the tool to restricted sectors such as legal, finance or data marketing.
Thomson Reuters, a data and services company, and legal technology company Legalzoom.com each fell more than 15% on Tuesday. Double-digit declines were also recorded for RELX, the London-based parent company of data analytics firm LexisNexis, and financial data firm FactSet.
Shares of major business software companies Salesforce and Workday also fell earlier this week.
Most of these companies recovered some of their losses on Wednesday, but all remained below their levels from earlier in the week.
The turmoil comes amid a string of years of stock market gains buoyed by enthusiasm for AI, even as some analysts have expressed concerns about the risk of an AI bubble.
Analysts interviewed by ABC News agreed that the liquidation of software companies indicated a perceived threat to established products in the sector. But they differ on whether the new AI tool poses a risk of imminent disruption in the enterprise software sector. Some analysts say it is too early to tell.
Jim Reid, research strategist at Deutsche Bank, said the market slide illustrates a months-long trend of increased competition for investor favor over AI.
“Over the past few months, the market has clearly shifted from a mentality that every tech stock is a winner to something much starker: a true landscape of winners and losers,” Reid noted in a note to clients Wednesday.
Reid referenced a memo he wrote in October, in which he warned: “AI has the potential to be transformative,” but “identifying long-term winners and losers at this early stage is close to pure guesswork.”
In turn, Reid said at the time that investors would “likely see a lot of volatility this year as market sentiment swings accordingly.”
In this Jan. 23, 2025, file photo, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei watches as he participates in a session on AI at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Fabrice Cofrini/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI could trigger an economic earthquake. Last June, Amodei told Axios this technology could cut entry-level jobs in the United States in half within five years.
In a blog post published in October, Amodei touted AI’s potential capabilities in the workplace, saying it can “be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, then go off and complete those tasks autonomously, as an intelligent employee would, asking for clarification when necessary.”
Anthropic did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Entry-level tasks in white-collar professions are threatened by AI, some analysts have already said ABC Newsemphasizing the ability of technology to perform written and computational tasks as opposed to manual labor.
Vasant Dhar, a data science professor at New York University who studies AI, said bare-bones legal services are “low-hanging fruit” in the event of possible disruption.
“You go to a lawyer and they charge you thousands of dollars for boilerplate things,” Dhar said. “Revising standard contacts is not a big deal.”
Some analysts, however, have expressed skepticism about the potential impact of advances in AI.
“It’s a strong model and extremely impressive. But I don’t see companies moving away from traditional providers for that reason,” Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at investment firm Wedbush, told ABC News.
Ives highlighted the difficulty of expanding enterprise AI tools for use in large companies with thousands of employees, who have developed processes using other products.
“You can’t just snap your fingers and adopt an enterprise-wide AI model,” Ives said.
Despite disagreements over the final adoption of Anthropic’s tool, analysts acknowledged the turbulence in the markets this week.
Ed Yardeni, president of market consulting firm Yardeni Research and former chief investment strategist at Deutsche Bank’s U.S. equities division, said software stocks have been “hit hard” by the Anthropic plugins, but he noted ambiguity about their long-term impact.
“It’s too early to tell how useful the new tools will be,” Yardeni said in a note this week.