After artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic announced a series of enterprise-level partnerships, the previously battered software stocks experienced a strong rebound on Tuesday. Market panic that AI technology would disrupt their business models temporarily cooled, with focus shifting instead to the practical application prospects of AI.
On Tuesday, during its enterprise agent event, Anthropic unveiled major updates for its productivity tool “Claude Cowork,” marking the product’s official transition from a research-oriented nature to enterprise-grade application. The company released ten new AI plugin tools in one go, expanding application scenarios into multiple verticals including investment banking, wealth management, human resources, private equity, and engineering design. These tools can be integrated into numerous enterprise applications, including Slack (owned by Salesforce CRM), Intuit (INTU), DocuSign (DOCU), LegalZoom (LZ), FactSet (FDS), and Google’s (GOOGL) Gmail.
Scott White, Head of Enterprise Product at Anthropic, clarified that Claude’s goal is to create greater value for customers, not to replace them. He emphasized that the product does not attempt to control all workflows but rather provides infrastructure and intelligence, allowing partners and customers to incorporate their own business knowledge, professional experience, and customer resources.
Following the announcement, shares of several partner companies rose accordingly. Among them, Thomson Reuters (TRI) saw its stock price surge as much as 14% during the session, marking its largest single-day gain in over two decades. At the event, the company showcased its AI assistant platform CoCounsel, designed for lawyers, and revealed that its users have exceeded one million. Thomson Reuters stated it is developing AI products that combine models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini. Driven by this, FactSet’s stock rose approximately 6%, Salesforce gained 4%, while DocuSign and LegalZoom both climbed nearly 3%. The index measuring the S&P 500 Software & Services sector rose 1.3% for the day, and the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), an exchange-traded fund focused on the software industry, closed 1.9% higher.
This rebound comes against the backdrop of a historic sell-off in the software sector recently. The previous news of Anthropic launching Claude Cowork had sparked widespread market concerns about AI disrupting traditional software, with IGV hitting a 10-month low on Monday. However, Tuesday’s positive reaction may signal a shift in the market narrative.
Analysts at Wedbush Securities believe that the competitive risk AI poses to the software industry has been “overblown.” AI models currently cannot replace the complete workflows embedded within existing software, and their effectiveness is entirely dependent on the data they can access. Anthropic’s White also responded, calling it an “overinterpretation” to directly link market performance to a single product launch, and emphasized that their AI models are designed to help customers achieve growth, not merely to replace existing solutions.
Despite improved market sentiment, risks still exist. Just on Monday, Anthropic mentioned that its Claude Code tool could be used to upgrade programming languages on IBM (IBM) systems, causing the stock price of this established technology company to suffer its largest single-day drop in over 25 years, although its shares rebounded by over 2% on Tuesday. The sell-off earlier this month once erased approximately $1 trillion in market value from Wall Street, impacting multiple sectors.
