I woke up Tuesday to my portfolio bleeding. Not because of bad earnings or geopolitical chaos—but because Anthropic released a folder of prompts.
Let that sink in. A collection of workflow configurations for Claude just erased $285 billion from software, legal tech, and financial services stocks in a single trading session. Thomson Reuters down 15%. LexisNexis parent RELX down 14%. LegalZoom hammered nearly 20%.
Analysts are calling it the 'SaaSpocalypse.' I'm calling it a wake-up call that most of the software industry still isn't ready for.
What Actually Happened
Last Friday, Anthropic quietly dropped 11 open-source plugins for Claude Cowork—their agentic AI assistant designed for non-technical professionals. One of those plugins targets legal workflows: contract review, NDA triage, compliance checks, legal briefings.
Here's what's wild: there's no proprietary legal model here. No special reasoning engine trained on case law. It's just Claude being Claude, with structured instructions on how to approach legal work.
And yet that was enough to trigger what Jefferies called 'get-me-out style selling' across the entire software sector.
Why This Is Different
The narrative around AI and software has fundamentally shifted. For years, the story was simple: AI helps software companies. Salesforce uses AI. Adobe uses AI. Everyone's adding AI features and investors love it.
But something changed. The market suddenly realized that AI doesn't just enhance software—it can replace it.
Think about it. Thomson Reuters literally runs their CoCounsel product on OpenAI. They're a customer of the AI providers. But when Anthropic starts publishing ready-made vertical solutions, the platform becomes the competitor. Why pay for CoCounsel when Claude can do the same thing out of the box?
This is the unbundling of SaaS, and it's happening faster than anyone predicted.
The Contrarian Take
Not everyone thinks the panic is justified. Jensen Huang called the selloff 'the most illogical thing in the world,' arguing that AI will use existing software tools, not replace them. 'Would you use a screwdriver or invent a new screwdriver?' he asked.
Sundar Pichai echoed the sentiment, suggesting companies 'seizing the moment' with AI would find opportunity, not obsolescence.
They're not entirely wrong. Enterprise software is sticky. Contracts are long. Switching costs are real. And most companies aren't going to rip out Salesforce because Claude can draft emails.
But here's my concern: they're thinking about today's AI. What happens when these agentic systems can actually manage the entire workflow—not just assist with it? What happens when a startup can spin up an AI-native legal department in a weekend?
The Real Signal
The most important data point buried in this chaos: enterprises now account for 80% of Anthropic's business. OpenAI is reportedly losing ground in the corporate market.
That's a massive shift. For years, OpenAI was the default choice for enterprises dipping their toes into AI. Now, Anthropic is winning those deals—and apparently, winning them by going vertical.
This isn't about a legal plugin. It's about Anthropic signaling that they're not just building models anymore. They're building the applications that will run on those models.
What I'm Watching
DocuSign fell 11%. Salesforce dropped 7%. Adobe slid 7%. ServiceNow declined 7%. The damage spread far beyond legal tech.
The question now is whether this is a one-day panic or the start of a structural repricing of the entire software sector. My gut says we're somewhere in between. The selloff was probably overdone in the short term, but the long-term threat is real.
If you're holding software stocks, this is the moment to honestly assess which companies are building AI moats and which are just adding chatbots to legacy products. Because Anthropic just showed us what happens when an AI company decides to eat your lunch.
The SaaSpocalypse might be overhyped today. But give it 18 months. The companies that dismissed this as noise will be the ones scrambling to explain why their growth disappeared.
