Software stock rout triggered by Anthropic legal services tool has not yet subsided,the companyOn Thursday it released a new version of its most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model, mainly used to perform financial research.The company said the version, called Claude Opus 4.6, can review corporate data, regulatory filings and market information and generate detailed financial analysis reports, a task that would normally take days to complete manually. In addition, Opus 4.6 will improve a range of other office functions, including spreadsheet and presentation production, and software development.
Shares of financial services companies fell following the news.FactSet Research Systems Inc. The decline was as high as 10%, S&P Global, Moody's and Nasdaq also all fell sharply.
Anthropic and rival OpenAI have spent much of the past year developing artificial intelligence tools in an attempt to simplify tasks in a variety of professional fields including financial services and healthcare, with the goal of attracting more corporate customers and justifying their lofty valuations. Currently, Anthropic is negotiating a new round of financing at a valuation of US$350 billion, while OpenAI’s ongoing financing negotiations value the company as high as US$830 billion.
OpenAI also launched an updated version of the AI programming assistant Codex, which is designed to further simplify the code writing and debugging process and can be used to build complex software such as video games and applications. The company emphasizes that the product's capabilities extend from writing software to a range of related documentation and presentation tasks, such as assisting with slide production and analyzing user data.
Anthropic has more than 300,000 enterprise customers who use its models to assist with some work tasks, especially in the field of computer programming. With Claude Code, Anthropic has become the leader in this market.
This expansion beyond programming has rattled Wall Street of late. Anthropic's previously low-key release of an automated legal services tool triggered a plunge in software stocks this week, as investors worried that some software would eventually become obsolete.
Anthropic’s Claude model product manager said that the company plans to focus on improvingCybersecurity, life sciences, healthcare and financial servicesExecution capabilities in related fields.
"These are the areas where we will be fully committed," he said.