Anthropic’s launch of Claude Opus 4.6 and new Claude Cowork tools triggered a sharp reaction in markets. Enterprise software shares and financial data providers slid as the company outlined wider ambitions in professional services.
Anthropic described Claude Opus 4.6 as an AI system that runs complex “knowledge work” in law, finance, and business operations. That framing raised questions about how much value traditional software firms can continue to capture.
Financial data providers felt the pressure. FactSet fell, while S&P Global, Moody’s, and Nasdaq also lost ground after the announcement. Investors linked those moves to Anthropic’s claim that Opus 4.6 performs advanced financial analysis, builds models, and works directly in spreadsheets and documents.
Earlier in the week, new industry plug-ins for the Claude Cowork environment had already weakened sentiment. Those tools targeted legal services, real estate platforms, and corporate research workflows. The follow-up launch of Opus 4.6 reinforced concerns that Anthropic now aims at the core of several mature software categories.
Enterprise SaaS names also came under scrutiny. Some portfolio managers started to reassess whether businesses will keep paying for overlapping platforms once AI agents handle much of the daily analysis inside existing office suites.
Anthropic designed Claude Opus 4.6 to coordinate teams of AI agents, not just respond to prompts. These agents split complex projects into pieces, handle coding, contract review, data gathering, and modeling, and then pass work between one another.
The model’s one-million-token context window supports this structure. Opus 4.6 can ingest large collections of filings, contracts, transcripts, and market data at once. It then produces screening lists, due diligence summaries, and market-intelligence reports that usually demand many hours from analysts.
The company also deepened its presence in office tools. Upgrades to Claude in Excel allow multi-step data cleanup and transformation within a single workflow. A research preview of Claude in PowerPoint lets the model turn those outputs into slide decks without leaving Microsoft’s ecosystem.
These features intensify competition for legal databases, research terminals, and specialist workflow software. If clients can access powerful analysis directly through cloud-hosted AI tools, they may question paying premium prices for separate interfaces built around similar information.
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Anthropic’s strategy centres on enterprise customers and developers rather than consumer chat alone. Many early adopters came for Claude’s coding support, then expanded into broader business uses through Claude Cowork. The company reports hundreds of thousands of business clients and rising API usage.
Market data from expense and API management platforms suggests that Claude accounts for a large share of AI spending. Developers embed the models inside their own products, which could weaken the hold legacy vendors enjoy over analytics and research workflows.
Anthropic also promotes a training method that uses AI systems to score and refine other AI outputs under human-set rules. The approach aims to speed up improvement and support consistent behaviour in fields such as finance and law.
Competing providers continue to respond with new coding and productivity models. Large cloud and software firms keep pushing their own AI assistants into core products. Even so, the market reaction to Claude Opus 4.6 shows that AI releases now feed directly into questions about earnings, margins, and long-term business models in the software and data sectors.