Stay updated with free updates
just sign up equities myFT Digest – delivered straight to your inbox.
European publishing and analytics stocks were under pressure on Wednesday, falling from Tuesday’s session after AI company Anthropic’s launch of productivity tools sparked selling among a group of artificial intelligence losers.
Anthropic’s new suite of tools for its cloud cowork platform, released Friday, promises to automate company tasks including legal work, marketing and customer support. The release has investors worried about the technology’s impact on media and analytics businesses, sending share prices sharply lower.
The London Stock Exchange group fell 2.5 percent, having fallen 12.8 percent on Tuesday. FTSE 100 media and data company Relax was 2.3 percent lower, after falling 14.4 percent in the previous session.
Advertising companies were also hit, with Publicis falling a further 3.3 per cent compared with 9.2 per cent on Tuesday, and WPP falling 3.1 per cent after Tuesday’s 11.8 per cent decline.
“Markets have seen a clear shift from AI enthusiasm towards greater differentiation between companies in recent months, and there is growing concern about its disruption to existing business models,” wrote Jim Reid, head of macro research at Deutsche Bank.
The move follows a Wall Street tech selloff on Tuesday led by analytics stocks and software groups amid fears that AI tools will eventually hurt their businesses as well.
Gartner and S&P Global fell 20.9 percent and 11.3 percent, respectively, while Intuit and Equifax both fell more than 10 percent.
Last year, Anthropic launched its AI-coding tool Cloud Code, which has quickly become the gold standard of AI coding for enterprises. The tool’s revenue reached $1 billion in just six months.
In January, the San Francisco-based company launched Cloud Cowork, a user-friendly interface that allows anyone to play with cloud code without technical skills. Cloud Cowork lets users create AI agents that can help with basic computing tasks like file management.
Last Friday, Anthropic launched a series of open source plug-ins for the Cowork tool that are tailored to specific use cases. One of them included a tool for legal services, which lets users do things like automate contract review.
Shares of several Asia-listed software companies also fell sharply, including Australia’s Xero, China’s Hong Kong-listed Kingsoft Corporation and Indian IT services groups Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.
Marija Weitmane, head of equity research at State Street, said the market’s “apocalyptic” reaction was “overly pessimistic” about the impact of new technology on some data companies.
“I don’t think we can completely replace data analytics and software writing,” he said. “Of course, there are adjustments, but those companies will be more efficient.”
“This is incremental improvement rather than a complete revolution.”
