Anthropic’s Claude Workflow drives sector-wide sell-off as investors fear AI replacing software services
As forecasts emerge that artificial intelligence (AI) tools will replace the existing software (SW) industry, the market capitalization of related companies plummeted by $300 billion (approximately 435 trillion Korean won) in a single day on the 3rd (local time). This reflects concerns that as AI advances beyond merely assisting with tasks to the point of replacing them, software companies are losing their place in the market.
The decline in the stock market that day was driven by AI company Anthropic’s AI tool ‘Claude Workflow’. Launched last month, Claude Workflow handles tasks such as organizing files, creating new reports, and sending emails on users’ computers. This time, the added ‘legal plugin’ function replaces tasks like contract reviews and drafting legal documents. As a result, the stock prices of legal software and data companies such as Thomson Reuters and LegalZoom each fell by more than 10%.
The aftermath spread across the entire software sector and into the financial sector. Software stocks across various sectors, including PayPal (-20.3%), Expedia (-15.3%), Adobe (-7.3%), and Salesforce (-6.9%), all plummeted. The stock prices of market analysis firms Gartner and S&P Global also fell by 20% and 11%, respectively. On that single day, the market capitalization of companies in S&P’s software-related index evaporated by $300 billion. Private equity funds that had continued large-scale investments in software also sustained damage.
Since the AI era began, software industry stock prices have been on a continuous downward trend. As concerns grow that companies can build their own services through AI agents (secretaries) instead of paying for software services, major software stocks have fallen by 30-40% over the past year.
With the advent of the AI agent (secretary) era, analyses suggest that AI-driven industrial shifts will begin in earnest this year. Steven Yu, Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Blue Whale Growth Fund, stated, “This year will be the year that determines whether companies become AI winners or victims,” adding, “Until the dust settles, it is dangerous to stand in the way of AI.”
