London, England – European software stocks are sliding as the industry grapples with the rise of AI – the very technology it helped create, as per Reuters.
Amid the rapid dominance of AI in programming, software stocks that originally built AI plugins to streamline engineering found themselves vulnerable following the launch of eleven diverse plugins for Anthropic’s Claude Cowork platform.
The Claude Cowork Plugin Suite, released on January 30, 2026, pivoted AI from a system that simply “talks” to one that “does”. By releasing these 11 open-source plugins on GitHub, Anthropic essentially shared the blueprints for automating high-value professional jobs.
With these new capabilities, Claude can potentially replace full-time employees by autonomously operating each of these plugins.
“SaaSpocalypse”
While investors had believed AI would positively reshape software stocks, the threat to traditional jobs became impossible to ignore when Anthropic’s plugins wiped out roughly $300 billion in market value.
JP Morgan and Jefferies analysts have coined a term for the threat: “SaaSpocalypse” – a portmanteau of SaaS (Software as a Service) and apocalypse, capturing fears that AI could devastate the software sector.
Among the companies hit the hardest were Thomson Reuters, with a historic one-day drop of 18%, LegalZoom falling 19.7%, and RELX (LexisNexis) plummeting 14%. For legacy players like Thomson Reuters – which has been building its own legal tools for decades – the blow carried particular weight, marking the company’s sharpest single-day decline since 2021.
“Software collapse broadens with nowhere to hide as AI rate-of-change is extrapolated in both logical and illogical ways,” JP Morgan lead analyst Mark Murphy said.
Experts also note that Anthropic’s plugin system is now providing more AI engines directly to customers, rendering traditional subscriptions redundant. Claude Cowork particularly has emerged as a fully-skilled agent for tasks across legal, sales, marketing, and data analysis.
“I think Anthropic came out with some plugins to tackle the legal space… Sometimes the market just shoots first and asks questions later”, stressed Mike Archibald, manager at AGF Investments.
The accountability deficit
Despite the technological AI rush in fintech market circles, the question of credibility and data storage still tilts in favor of the real human factor. Companies like Thomson Reuters and RELX hold proprietary gold-standard, data-curated, legally-authoritative and verified information they have spent years gathering.
Expert curation also holds significant value, while Claude’s plugins may only offer generalized outputs – a gap that becomes critical in recent legislative changes or high-stakes litigation, where a single word can cost billions.
Such factors have led the same analysts to coin a follow-up term: “Post-SaaSpocalypse”, reflecting a growing belief that while AI has disrupted the software sector, human expertise and proprietary data remains indispensable. “The moat is no longer the software; it is the truth. A general agent can predict the next word, but it cannot verify the last century of law”, said Steve Hasker, CEO of Thomson Reuters.
Featured image: EU bans merger of German and British stock exchanges
Source: Heute.at
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