US Tech stocks bounce back after Anthropic reassurance on AI competition
The US Software stocks rallied on Tuesday, February 24, after AI startup Anthropic unveiled new enterprise partnerships and product updates, helping calm investor concerns that artificial intelligence could significantly disrupt the sector.
At its enterprise agents event, Anthropic introduced updates to Claude Cowork, enabling companies to integrate the tool with major enterprise applications, including Salesforce-owned Slack, Intuit, Docusign, LegalZoom, FactSet and Google’s Gmail.
The company also said that organisations would be able to deploy customised plugins across areas such as financial analysis, engineering and human resources.
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Following the announcements, shares of Salesforce climbed 4%, while Docusign and LegalZoom rose more than 2% each. Thomson Reuters shares jumped over 11%, and FactSet gained nearly 6%.
In a research note on Tuesday, analysts at Wedbush Securities said that the event suggested fears of AI replacing traditional software platforms are overstated.
They said, “The reality is that these new AI tools will not rip and replace existing software ecosystems and data environments with these AI tools only as useful as the data it can reach.”
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They argued that AI models are not yet capable of fully replacing workflows that are “deeply embedded” in existing software infrastructure.
In recent weeks, Anthropic’s product rollouts have contributed to a sell-off in software and cybersecurity stocks, as investors weighed the potential competitive threat from AI-native tools.
On Tuesday, many of those stocks recovered. Okta and Cloudflare each rose about 2%, while Zscaler and Tenable gained roughly 4%. SentinelOne advanced 3%. CrowdStrike finished largely flat.
IBM, which had dropped sharply on Monday after Anthropic promoted a tool capable of automating aspects of a programming language used on IBM systems, rebounded more than 2% in Tuesday trading.