By Adam Clark

Just in case you'd forgotten about the artificial-intelligence threat to the stock market, Microsoft is offering a reminder by deepening its integration with Anthropic's Claude. But it might be a sign AI is finally set to become a help to software stocks rather than a risk.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on Monday the company was launching "Copilot Cowork," a tool integrating Anthropic's Claude Cowork AI into Microsoft's own Copilot platform.

Yes, the naming is a nightmare. But the bottom line is that Microsoft is aiming to turn what had been perceived as a major threat to its software business into an ally. Anthropic is generally recognized to be at the forefront of so-called agents -- AI which can carry out multistep tasks independently. Adding its technology to Copilot should make Microsoft's software more capable of running autonomously.

The question investors might have is why customers will choose to use Cowork via Microsoft rather than going directly to Anthropic. The answer could lie in ease-of-use and safety, mitigating the risks of giving an agent direct access to customers' data and devices.

"Copilot Cowork runs within Microsoft 365's security and governance boundaries," said Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's president of business applications and agents, in a blog post. "Identity, permissions, and compliance policies apply by default, and actions and outputs are auditable."

The Copilot Cowork tool is currently in testing and will be available to users of Microsoft's early-access Frontier program later this month, Microsoft said.

Microsoft also on Monday announced that from May 1 it will make available Agent 365 -- a $15-a-month product designed to govern AI agents -- and its Microsoft 365 Enterprise 7 suite which will combine its existing Enterprise 5 suite of tools, its 365 Copilot platform and Agent 365 in a single $99-a-month package.

More broadly, the Microsoft announcement should act as further reassurance that Anthropic intends for its AI tools to act as a complement to existing software suites rather than a wholesale replacement.

Barron's has argued that many incumbent software providers have seen their stocks unduly harshly hit over the perceived AI threat and Wall Street analysts agree.

"The misunderstanding about the impact of AI has helped bring software valuations to reasonable levels for the first time in more than 5 years, " D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria wrote in a research note on Monday.

Luria identified Microsoft as one of the stocks that appears attractive after a 16% drop this year so far, alongside fellow software companies ServiceNow, Dynatrace, JFrog, Snowflake, Datadog and Shopify. He noted that recent stock reactions to earnings by software companies suggest the market is becoming more confident in the sector and there is the potential for AI to help cut costs and lead to improving profitability.

"Investors may be underestimating that the largest potential for AI-driven cost reduction is actually the software companies themselves," Luria wrote.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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March 09, 2026 11:23 ET (15:23 GMT)

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