Anthropic’s Claude triggered a trillion-dollar selloff. A new upgrade could make things worse

Earlier this week, the release of industry-specific plug-ins for Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork tool triggered a broad selloff across enterprise software stocks, as investors panicked that AI tools like Claude would render traditional enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies obsolete. What Anthropic unveiled Thursday might spell yet more trouble for those older software companies, further heightening market anxiety.

The AI company debuted Claude Opus 4.6, an advanced AI model capable of conducting sophisticated professional tasks and spinning up and coordinating whole teams of AI agents.

Anthropic says Opus 4.6’s performance on real-world professional tasks is a substantial step up from previous iterations. On select evaluations designed to measure this real-world performance, the company said it outperformed competing models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2. (On Thursday, OpenAI also released GPT-5.3-Codex, which it says is its top performing coding model to date and exceeds the prior version in capabilities.)

But it’s the new feature in Opus 4.6 that lets autonomous teams of AI agents tackle complex projects together that might have the greatest impact on productivity within companies, and that might pose the greatest threat to SaaS vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft, and Workday, which have been trying to get existing customers to upgrade to their own AI agent platforms. (In a direct challenge to Microsoft’s Copilot offerings, Opus 4.6 includes a plug-in with PowerPoint, enabling Anthropic’s Claude model to easily spin up entire slide decks without the need to export files between applications.)

The agent teams feature allows users to deploy multiple AI agents simultaneously that handle different aspects of a larger project. The agents work in parallel and communicate with one another to coordinate their efforts—mimicking how human teams divide and conquer complex assignments. The teams feature is only available in a research preview for API users and subscribers.

Financial data providers bore the brunt of investor anxiety over the new release, with FactSet Research Systems dropping 10%, while S&P Global, Moody’s, and Nasdaq all saw sharp declines. These losses add to a global selloff that began earlier this week following Anthropic’s rollout of industry-specific plug-ins. The Claude Cowork plug-ins, which Anthropic had billed as a relatively minor product update, triggered investor anxiety over the sustainability of traditional enterprise software companies across multiple sectors, including legal services, financial data, and real estate.

The new model’s research and analysis abilities are likely what spooked financial services investors on Friday. Anthropic said Opus 4.6 excels at financial analysis and research, with the model’s performance on certain benchmarks indicating its “usefulness for financial research tasks such as screening, due diligence data gathering, and market-intelligence synthesis”—work that is currently a part of the business models of financial services firms.

Claude Opus 4.6’s expanded 1-million-token context window—a measure of the amount of data an AI model can ingest at one time—may also bolster the model’s financial and professional capabilities by allowing Claude to simultaneously consider vast arrays of documents and financial data that would have overwhelmed earlier versions.

Many analysts argue the market’s response is overblown. Wedbush’s Dan Ives, for example, noted that large organizations have ingrained workflows and processes that can’t simply be switched over to new AI tools overnight.

“Predictions of the death of SaaS and enterprise applications are premature,” Gartner analysts wrote in a Thursday research note, adding that Cowork and its plug-ins are “potential disrupters for task-level knowledge work but are not a replacement for SaaS applications managing critical business operations.”

Rather than triggering a so-called SaaSapocalypse, Gartner said the new model “exposes how much day-to-day knowledge work remains manual, making it ripe for automation.”

Anthropic’s enterprise push

The release comes as Anthropic broadens its enterprise ambitions beyond software development. Opus 4.6 is designed to support complex business processes and help enterprises apply AI beyond coding tasks. It builds on the recent popularity of the company’s Claude Cowork product, which is a nontechnical version of the popular Claude Code tool for programmers.

Anthropic has over 300,000 business customers, many of whom first came in for developer‑focused tools before expanding into broader Claude products. The company’s push from coding into other professional domains, such as knowledge work and customer support, is increasing competitive pressure on incumbent software providers, which now risk facing Anthropic’s models as cheaper, more capable alternatives in parts of their workflows.

OpenAI also put pressure on stocks with the release of its own coding assistant on Thursday. In the release, the company emphasized that the tool extends beyond pure programming and into tasks like documentation and presentations, representing another potential overlap with traditional business software.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com