MW Anthropic's Claude Cowork is a fresh drag on software stocks. Are investors overreacting?

By Christine Ji

Anthropic's new tool has some on Wall Street even more fearful that traditional software will become obsolete - but others see a buying opportunity

The launch of Claude Cowork on Monday sent software stocks tumbling over concerns that AI threatens traditional offerings.

Could artificial intelligence be a software killer? Wall Street has been debating this question for over a year, and Anthropic's latest product launch just added more fuel to the fire.

On Monday, Anthropic launched its Claude Cowork product, which acts as an autonomous digital assistant. Unlike traditional chatbots, Cowork can access and edit folders on a user's computer and connect to browser-based tools to complete office tasks.

Cowork is meant to bring the capabilities of Anthropic's highly successful Claude Code product - which reached a $1 billion revenue run rate in just six months - to non-coders. According to Anthropic, Claude Cowork was built in less than two weeks using its existing Claude Code tool. Claude Cowork is available as a research preview to Claude Max subscribers on macOS at a premium price point of up to $200 per month.

If an AI tool such as Cowork can autonomously handle a wide range of complicated workflows, investors fear it could reduce the need for specialized solutions and reduce subscription revenues for incumbents.

Shares of major software companies Salesforce (CRM) and Adobe $(ADBE)$ were some of the biggest losers in the S&P 500 SPX on Monday, as negative investor sentiment for the sector deepened. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF IGV has shed 4% since the beginning of the week.

Read: Salesforce and Adobe see their stocks slide as AI fears intensify

However, some analysts believe Claude Cowork is the latest sensationalized headline feeding into an overly pessimistic narrative of AI eating software. William Blair analyst Arjun Bhatia called the market reaction "overdone" on Thursday.

"Claude Cowork adds yet another sentiment headwind to public software stocks, but not a fundamental headwind," Bhatia wrote in a Thursday note. He acknowledged that while AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI could bring some level of disruption to enterprise software," this does not justify the broad-based indiscriminate selling we are seeing across the sector."

Bhatia argued that traditional enterprise software companies remain protected by data scale, platform breadth and workflows that general-purpose agents cannot easily replicate. Furthermore, software incumbents are moving fast to integrate their own AI capabilities directly into their massive installed customer bases.

On Wednesday, Mizuho analyst Siti Panigrahi wrote that "overblown AI fears" have presented attractive buying opportunities for software investors in names such as Intuit $(INTU)$. Shares of Intuit have fallen 13% since the beginning of the week on concerns that Claude Cowork could eventually have the ability to file taxes for users, but Panigrahi said that tax filing is too complex and high-stakes for a generalized AI tool to handle.

See more: How can Anthropic stand out in the AI wars? I went to a Greenwich Village pop-up to find out.

-Christine Ji

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January 15, 2026 13:29 ET (18:29 GMT)

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