When artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic released a new set of business-focused tools for its Claude large language model (LLM), you might have thought it would not have much of an impact on the stock market. After all, Anthropic isn’t publicly traded (yet), and companies like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) have been releasing business-focused AI tools for years.
But Claude Cowork — and, specifically, its set of plugins geared toward specific industries, like legal, finance, and sales — sent the market into a tailspin, taking a number of software companies and Anthropic’s AI rivals along for the ride.
Will AI create the world’s first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an “Indispensable Monopoly” providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue »
For one notable AI stock, however, the market may have been too quick to judge, and some well-connected investors are taking advantage right now. Here’s what they’re buying and why.
Most of the companies that got pulled downward in the wake of the Claude Cowork rollout were companies offering business-focused software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, like Salesforce, Intuit, and Atlassian (the stocks of which are down 27.9%, 33%, and 41.6% year-to-date, respectively, as I write this). Anxious investors worried that these companies’ business customers would stop spending money on their expensive SaaS platforms if an AI tool could just handle the tasks those platforms are meant to streamline.
But another company pulled down by the sell-off was Google parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG). Its shares dropped more than 6% in the week following the announcement. Of course, that’s nothing compared to, say, legal database provider Thomson Reuters‘ 19.3% sell-off, but it’s still significant for a company that doesn’t provide the kind of industry-specific software packages on which Claude Cowork is expected to have an impact.
However, Google does have a huge presence in the AI race along with its own LLM, Gemini. In November, Google rolled out its own LLM update called Gemini 3, which was a big step forward in Google’s AI offerings and edged out OpenAI’s ChatGPT by some intelligence metrics. The rollout included agentic AI capabilities and an updated version of the popular Nano Banana image generator. Gemini 3 saw a huge uptick in paid subscribers, many of whom likely defected from ChatGPT. Investors are clearly concerned that Claude may now poach those same subscribers from Google.
