Claude Cowork in 2 Weeks, Trillion Gone. AI Killing Software?
Anthropic's Claude Cowork, built in two weeks, erased nearly $1 trillion in software market cap. Is AI ending the SaaS era forever?
This week, Silicon Valley staged its most terrifying drama.
Global capital markets unleashed indiscriminate selling in the software sector. Salesforce, Workday, Intuit... these “rent-collecting landlords” that had been among the steadiest performers in U.S. stocks over the past decade saw nearly $258 billion in market value evaporate in just a single day.
The sell-off came with ferocious intensity. U.S. software stocks led the plunge on February 3, with the S&P North American Software Index posting declines for three consecutive weeks and a cumulative drop of 15% in January—the worst monthly performance since 2008. Panic soon spread to Asia-Pacific markets, where multiple industry leaders saw their share prices plummet.
There was no macroeconomic collapse, no black-swan event. The spark that ignited this turmoil was simply one AI company, Anthropic, giving its AI “hands and feet.”
Wall Street voted with its feet, delivering an extremely brutal forecast: before AI truly starts taking human jobs, the traditional software industry may first undergo a complete reshuffling.
When AI is just one layer of window paper away
The butterfly that triggered the tsunami is called Claude Cowork.
