Everything Anthropic Touches Turns Into a Stock Crash
By Siddharth Jindal ·
Over the past few weeks, Anthropic has become a growing headache for the software and IT industry—at least that’s what the markets suggest. The latest casualty is IBM.
In a recent blog post, Anthropic claimed that the Claude Code tool could modernise legacy COBOL systems into modern languages like Java and Python.
“Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government. Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year,” the company posted.
That triggered a 13.2% crash in IBM’s share price, wiping out $40 billion from its market cap and marking its biggest one-day drop since 2000.
On the market reaction, CEO Arvind Krishna, in an interview with ET, said that IBM had released a COBOL modernisation tool more than two years ago and that it is already used by nearly 200 clients. He suggested the reaction to Anthropic’s post was overstated.
Responding to AIM’s queries, IBM said it has been investing in code modernisation through skilling and AI initiatives.
“More than two years ago, we launched watsonx Code Assistant for Z (IBM's mainframe) because we understand the benefit of AI in modernising code. New AI tools emerge every week, including our own. What they do not change is the fundamental engineering challenge of running mission-critical workloads at scale.”
Krishna argued that the dominance of mainframes in global retail banking is not about COBOL but about architecture. Moreover, he asserted it would take “the next six months, 12 months, 18 months” to assess the broader impact of AI-driven coding tools, adding that IBM believes companies should adopt AI tools to modernise all codebases, “not just COBOL.”
“The real work is data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and hardware-accelerated performance built over decades of tight software and hardware coupling,” the company said in the statement.
Unstoppable Anthropic
Anthropic is on an unstoppable streak, introducing updates to Cowork and plugins in Claude Enterprise that allow administrators to create private plugin marketplaces and manage plugins, connectors, and skills across organisations.
Claude can now also orchestrate tasks across Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, passing context between the two applications in a research preview.
Besides that, the company added connectors for Google Workspace apps, including Calendar, Drive, and Gmail, as well as DocuSign, Apollo, Clay, Outreach, Similarweb, MSCI, LegalZoom, FactSet, WordPress, and Harvey. Companies such as Slack by Salesforce, LSEG, S&P Global, Apollo, Common Room, and Tribe AI have also developed plugins for joint customers.
New pre-built plugins cover HR, design, engineering, and operations. For financial services teams, Anthropic introduced plugins for financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management workflows.
Claude Code is hitting early-stage startups, too. Ira Bodnar, Founder of AI-powered ad management startup Ryze, said a recent product update from Anthropic has already impacted her company’s growth.
“I woke up today and Claude killed my startup,” Bodnar wrote in a post on X. “We got several hundred paying clients in two months, were growing like crazy. One Claude/Manus feature and our close rate dropped from 70% to 20%.”
Bodnar’s startup built an AI agent that automates ad management across Google and Meta accounts. However, the new connectors introduced by Claude and Manus for Meta Ads made her entire product category obsolete, signalling where the market is heading.
The Anti-Midas
Recent market moves are closely tied to Anthropic’s product launches.
This week, the company announced its Claude Code Security tool, which scans code for vulnerabilities and suggests patches. This weighed heavy cybersecurity stocks, with shares of CrowdStrike and Datadog falling about 11% on February 23. Zscaler, Fortinet, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, and SentinelOne stocks were also impacted.
Earlier, in February, Anthropic launched 11 plugins for its Claude Cowork agent to automate tasks across legal, sales, marketing, and data analysis functions. These are the areas where companies have largely relied on SaaS tools. That unleashed 'SaaSpocalypse' on global and Indian IT stocks, decimating Freshworks' shares and the Nifty IT index falling 6% at the opening bell on February 4.
This was just the beginning of a wider technology selloff. In February, India’s Nifty IT index fell about 21%, wiping out roughly $68.6 billion in market value. All 10 companies in the index declined between 16% and 27%.
Coforge was among the worst hit, plunging nearly 26.8%, while TCS and Infosys led the value erosion, losing around $21.9 billion and $16.3 billion, respectively, amid intensifying investor concerns about AI.
Is Market Fear Justified?
Saanya Ojha, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, describes the recent market reaction as increasingly predictable. “Anthropic ships a new product. Public comps anywhere near that surface get marked down on contact. Contagion does the rest,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Referring to the launch of Claude Code Security, Ojha noted that cybersecurity stocks “traded like it was extinction-level,” with even adjacent identity and access management firms such as Okta and SailPoint selling off. She compared the reaction to “selling airlines because someone invented a faster elevator.”
At the same time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is himself optimistic about the future of Indian IT. In a recent interview with Nikhil Kamath, Amodei said that Anthropic views itself primarily as an enterprise company rather than a consumer-facing firm entering India to acquire users.
Amodei said that Anthropic aims to partner with Indian firms and provide them with AI tools to strengthen their own offerings.
The entrepreneur noted that local firms have deeper expertise in consulting, systems integration, and IT services, particularly within the Indian market. Notably, Anthropic recently partnered with Infosys.
“They’re better at doing what they do, whether that’s consulting or systems integration or building IT tools. They’re going to be better at that than we are, particularly for the Indian market. And so our hope is that we can add AI to what they do and kind of enhance what they do,” he added.
Addressing concerns that AI could displace SaaS or IT services models, Amodei said the outcome depends on execution. “If we do this in the right way, if we work with all these companies, then AI can enhance what they’re doing, can enhance their connection to the market,” he said.
Meanwhile, with more Anthropic offerings expected, Indian IT would need to reassure investors—and clients—that it remains globally competitive.
In an earlier conversation with AIM, Deepak Shenoy, CEO, Capitalmind AMC, said, “These companies will need to upskill to become the AI orchestrators of choice. AI is changing the game. You'll need fewer people to do a project, and less middle management.”