Last fall, OpenAI sent shockwaves through the software industry. Now, Anthropic is doing the same.
A new wave of announcements from Anthropic this week revived fears that generative AI could undermine the economics of traditional software companies.
In a research note published Wednesday, analysts at RBC Capital Markets said a flurry of recent product launches from Anthropic, including new AI tools for productivity and healthcare, has coincided with a broad selloff across the software sector and could deepen concerns that AI is becoming a competitive threat rather than a tailwind.
On Sunday, Anthropic rolled out Claude for Healthcare & Life Sciences, which includes HIPAA-ready enterprise tools. The next day, it unveiled Claude Cowork, an AI agent that handles document generation and file management. And then on Tuesday, it announced the expansion of Labs, an internal incubator team that tests and showcases experimental AI products.
Shares of Salesforce, Workday, Intuit, and Snowflake fell sharply after this barrage of news, losing between 6% and 13%. That suggests investors are starting to reassess whether software companies can defend their pricing power as AI capabilities expand, RBC noted.
“While headline risk is not new (we saw announcements from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. cause material intra-day swings in stock prices throughout 2025), we believe the velocity of innovation and announcements from the model providers could continue to weigh on the broader software landscape throughout 2026,” RBC analysts wrote.
No longer “AI-proof”
For years, SaaS companies have justified recurring subscription fees by packaging productivity features, analytics, automation, and domain expertise into proprietary tools. But AI threatens to flatten that value proposition by turning many of those features into on-demand capabilities accessible through a single interface.
The anxiety isn’t new. Last year, OpenAI triggered a similar sell-off after demonstrating a suite of internal workplace tools built on top of its models. An April report from AlixPartners found that roughly 100 software companies were being “squeezed” by AI-driven competition.
Perhaps most concerning for investors is that AI’s reach now appears to be extending into vertical software, an area long viewed as relatively insulated because of regulatory complexity and domain expertise.
RBC analysts said Anthropic’s healthcare-focused tools suggest that assumption may no longer hold. By integrating directly with industry databases such as PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov, and by offering specialized agent skills tailored to medical workflows, AI providers are beginning to encroach on niches historically served by specialized vendors.
“We’ve viewed vertical software as one pocket of software that is likely to be viewed as ‘AI-proof’ (for now), given the deep domain, regulatory nuance, and workflow expertise required to be successful,” RBC’s note stated. “That said, recently announced Claude for Healthcare & Life Sciences suggests the AI bear narrative contagion could spread to some vertical names, and they may prove to be less defensive (at least from a multiple perspective) than originally thought.”
The analysts warned that the AI overhang on software “may remain” and “could spread” as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google accelerate their pace of announcements.
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