Global stock markets took a hit after Anthropic, a US AI company, dropped a fresh batch of tools for corporate legal teams.
The news broke last week, and investors didn’t wait around; they started selling off shares in European legal software firms, US tech companies, and Indian IT stocks almost right away.
Anthropic’s New Claude Agents Trigger Tech Stock Sell-Off
People are worried that AI isn’t just here to help out with software and outsourcing, but might actually wipe out some of those business models altogether. That fear fueled a steep sell-off in US software shares overnight, and the shockwaves rolled right through Europe and Asia.
Anthropic built their new tool to automate jobs in legal, sales, marketing, and data analysis.
The sell-off kicked off before US markets even opened. Investors reacted fast after Anthropic posted details about its expanded Cowork features on its website, especially the new legal-focused capabilities, according to Bloomberg.
What does this new AI tool actually do?
Anthropic’s Claude Legal agent is designed to handle the boring but important stuff—like reviewing documents, checking compliance, and drafting legal briefs.
Anthropic insists, though, that “all outputs should be reviewed by licensed attorneys,” Bloomberg reported.
But it’s bigger than just legal work. The new Claude agents can now tackle tasks that used to need other platforms like Store or ServiceNow. That’s set off alarm bells for companies like Salesforce, DocuSign, Adobe, Workday, and ServiceNow. Shares for several of these firms fell overnight, according to multiple reports.
What are the various plugins and their functionality?
The site of Anthropic states that nowadays there is a variety of plugins that can cooperate with Claude Cowork like Productivity. that would organize the work, plan day and create long-term memory about the context of the work. Product Management plugin is able to author feature specifications, plan roadmaps, and generate ver esearch and keep stakeholders informed.
Marketing plugin is able to produce content, strategise, and to measure performance across marketing channels. Equally, Legal plugin has the ability to accelerate the process of reviewing contracts, NDA screening and compliance processes of the in-house legal departments.
Markets Rattle as Anthropic Expands Claude AI Into Legal, Sales and Data Tasks
This is assisted by the Finance plugin, which assists in simplifying the finance operations such as journal entries, reconciliation, financial statements, and variance analysis.
Enterprise Search may also assist in search of all the tools of the company under a single place-mail, chat, documents and vikis. Dio Research is a type of plug-in which connects to preclinical research tools and databases to speed up early-stage life sciences R&D.
In the meantime, the Data plugin is also capable of writing SQL, scanning through, and creating insights as well as creating visualisations and dashboards using raw data.
The market response was quick and harsh. A Goldman Sachs portfolio of US software stocks dropped, the biggest one-day loss since April, and close to 285 billion dollars of market value was erased in software, financial services and asset management stocks Bloomberg reported.
The value of major US software companies plummeted on Tuesday, February 3, and this pushed the Nasdaq by more than 350 points.
