Pupil earthquake! Overnight, global software stocks collectively plummeted, evaporating $300 billion.
Nowadays, the entire Silicon Valley is saying: Software as a Service (SaaS) is dead!
The reason turned out to be that Anthropic implanted "plugins" functionality into Claude Cowork. Relying solely on one's own efforts, Lingchi is a well-established giant company.
Attention! This is not a 'new model', only 11 'new plugins'.
They directly command various industries such as finance, sales, and law, without being nested in software to run. AI directly replaces software.
For the first time in history, an AI company specializing in underlying models has directly terminated the "application layer" and taken over the entire business workflow.
Nowadays, the entire Wall Street is in a panic, claiming that the 'SaaS Apocalypse' has truly arrived.
JPMorgan Chase reports that Anthropic is devouring the entire world, causing the collapse of Saas' business model and leaving nowhere to hide!
In terms of the US stock market, shortly after the opening on Wednesday, Oracle fell 4.2%.
As a result, other software giants also fell: Adobe fell 2.6%, Salesforce fell 3.3%, and Atlassian fell 3% .....
In just 24 hours of trading on Tuesday local time, the market value of software, legal technology, and data service companies evaporated by approximately $285 billion to $300 billion.
Reuters reported that since January 28th, the stock prices of software and services have evaporated by nearly $830 billion.
It is extremely frightening to think that this is only the "research preview version" of 11 plugins, which has rooted the foundation of AI automation in various industries.
It has to be said that living in this era is really crazy!
A big shot commented sharply, 'The market has finally awakened from the cold mathematical logic: if models can directly deliver results, traditional software shells will be worthless.'.
The model is the employee, and the software is the foam. The turn of Anthropic has declared the end of an era.
Many people also say that this is just a historical episode and the future is unimaginable.
Speaking of which, what magic does Anthropic's Cowork "plugin" have that has caused panic in global software stocks?
All of this has to go back to January 29th, a 'little update' that didn't cause any big waves.
Claude Cowork, a productivity and office artifact, has become a popular Crispy fried chicken overnight since its birth, and companies are following suit.
Last weekend, Cowork finally received an epic update: adding 11 new plugins.
Don't underestimate this small update, as 11 plugins cover multiple fields including sales, finance, law, data, and marketing in one go.
In the official website introduction, Anthropic describes its abilities as follows:
You can integrate various skills, connectors, slash commands, and sub agents together to transform Claude into a "special forces soldier" proficient in his position, team, and company business.
Taking the 'sales plugin' as an example: it can integrate Claude into personal CRM and knowledge base to learn the sales process.
From now on, humans can easily complete tasks such as researching potential customers and following up with them after they arrive. Plugin configuration only needs to be done "once", and Claude will automatically call background information whenever related tasks are involved.
As is well known, Claude Cowork is the 'non code version of Claude Code'.
In fact, Claude Code is also one of the "culprits" behind the sharp decline in the market value of software giants. Its powerful programming ability has stirred up and even overturned the underlying logic of coding.
Their appearance sends a strong signal that large models are entering the so-called 'application layer'.
Market analysis suggests that Anthropic's strategy has shifted from simply providing APIs (tools) to a "plug and play" workflow.
When Claude Cowork is able to independently read/organize files and complete end-to-end legal contract review, it is no longer an "assistant" to SaaS software, but has truly evolved into a "replacement" for SaaS.
Therefore, the global software industry is experiencing an extremely tragic 'earthquake of faith'!
Silicon Valley's' faith 'collapses, LLM enters the application layer
In fact, the sharp decline in US stock software is not a one-day cold, and there have been a series of signs since last year.
However, this update of Anthropic has become the biggest "spark", directly planting the flag in the territory where traditional software relies on for survival.
This dimensionality reduction blow reminds investors of Amazon back then - starting from selling books and ultimately disrupting multiple industries such as retail, cloud services, and logistics.
Statistics show that in the past month, the S&P North American Software Index has fallen by 18%, reaching its lowest level since April 2025.
In just five trading days, the S&P 500 Software Services Index plummeted by nearly 13%, with its market value shrinking so rapidly that it even overshadowed the S&P 500 market, which had just set a new historical high.
This storm not only swept through Wall Street, but also affected Asia and Europe. Even Nvidia CEO Lao Huang urgently spoke out:
There is a view that tools in the software industry are declining and will be replaced by AI;
This is the most illogical thing in the world, time will prove everything.
Indeed, time will prove everything.
Imagine you are the legal director of a Fortune 500 company.
On Monday morning at 7 o'clock, you opened your email. It should have been an anxious day - the thousand page merger and acquisition contract left over from last week is still waiting for manual audit, involving hundreds of non-standard terms, renewal dates, and cross default conditions.
But now is different from the past.
Claude Cowork's legal agent plugin has logged into your legal database overnight, independently completed entity relationship mapping, extracted all key dates, identified three potential risk clauses, and generated a complete compliance report. Even the PDF has been automatically formatted.
You stare at the screen and don't even notice when the coffee cools down: it doesn't require you to click any buttons, it just 'does' it.
This is not science fiction. This is the reality on February 3, 2026.
For the legal technology industry, although this is not the Great Depression of 1929, the situation is definitely not good.
·Thomson Reuters' market value evaporated by about 15%.
·The parent company of Law and Commerce Union News fell by about 14%.
·DocuSign, the electronic signature champion, fell 11%.
Over the past year, legal technology companies have been hyping up the idea that intelligent AI is the future, but have not produced much tangible results.
Now, a basic modeling company has released an intelligent legal tool, and the market suddenly realizes that the "popularization" of legal AI may "popularize" the customer base of legal technology to the point of disappearing.
This directly triggered a collective decline in software stocks in the US stock market
Gartner plummeted 21%, Thomson Reuters fell 18%, ServiceNow fell 11%, and Salesforce experienced a circuit breaker.
The Nasdaq fell $550 billion in market value in just two days, the worst record since October last year.
This wave of 'software stock massacre' started on February 3rd and spread all the way to February 4th, and traders have given it a new name: 'SaaS Spocalypse' - the end of the SaaS world.
And this wave of selling has expanded to a larger market.
Due to market concerns about the risk exposure of private equity credit stocks to software companies impacted by AI, related stocks have experienced a significant decline.
Blue Owl, TPG, Ares Management, and KKR all fell by over 10%. Apollo fell 7%, while BlackRock fell 5%.
The iShares Software ETF has fallen 20% this year, marking the largest single day decline in three years.
The entire software module seems to have been drained of oxygen.
Market panic is spreading globally.
European advertising giants WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis collectively fell more than 10%, and the European stock market evaporated $300 billion.
Relx (which owns LexisNexis), which was originally seen as an AI winner in the UK, fell 14.4%, while the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) fell 12.8%, hitting its worst single day performance in five years. Advertising giants WPP and Omnicom have also plummeted due to concerns about marketing being automated.
Indian IT giants such as TCS and Infosys are facing a revenue risk of $300 billion, evaporating 19.1 trillion rubles in a day, about $201 billion.
Labor cost arbitrage seems to be disappearing, affecting 1.6 million Indian IT workers, while Anthropic has only 2500 employees.
Who else is talking about AI foam in the market now?
AnthropolicAIbutterfly flapped its wings, and the global stock market was stormy and terrifying -
It didn't sell models this time, it sold 'IT industry death judgments'.
Microsoft Salesforce、Adobe， Everyone is a SaaS leader.
In 2023, the global spending on cloud SaaS alone will exceed $400 billion. But now, this model is facing a fierce impact from generative AI.
The warning has long been in place: AI tools, especially those AI agents that can automatically perform tasks, may make many SaaS software "unnecessary".
The Cowork plugin released by Anthropic was the last straw that broke the camel's back.
The moat of traditional SaaS is built on three pillars:
Charge by seat (Per Seat) - the more people, the more money;
Users must adapt to complex UI/UX;
The more comprehensive and closed the function, the higher the barrier.
But Claude Cowork crushed everything. Now is the era of AaaS (Agent as a Service):
Charging mode → Per Output billing;
Interaction logic → zero UI, AI operates directly in the background;
The more open the interface, the higher the survival probability of the system value.
The logic of destruction is extremely simple:
One Claude agent can handle the workload of 10 junior accountants or legal assistants.
A company originally needed to purchase 100 Salesforce or Zendesk seats, but now only needs 10 Claude seats.
Seat fees are the lifeblood of SaaS companies, and AI is precisely cutting them with a surgical knife.
So, those SaaS were 'sentenced to death' -
DocuSign plummeted as Claude was able to read contracts and operate the signing process on his own;
Zendesk crashes as AI customer service reaches 95% human level;
HubSpot has fallen as AI can now automatically write, send, track marketing emails, and even create its own strategies.
Are you still willing to pay for a beautiful UI when AI can directly complete everything in the background?
A new consensus has emerged: the (software) service economy is facing a slow but inevitable demise. With the integration of AI, autonomous robots, and the physical world, high-end services are being commodified, and the premium that "artificially packaged" software once enjoyed is rapidly evaporating.
Even more brutal is the second-order blow.
Software companies are the largest customer group for cloud service providers.
When software companies are disrupted by AI, cloud giants are also implicated:; Oracle fell 3.4%, Microsoft fell 2.9%, and Nvidia fell 2.8%.
AMD's quarterly revenue exceeded expectations and provided a strong guidance of $9.8 billion, but its stock price fell 5-8% after hours - as the crazy demand for memory in data centers is pushing costs to the sky and profit margins are being eaten alive.
Has it been exaggerated?
The market does not fully agree that AI is killing SaaS.
The latest report from Wolfe Research bluntly states that 'the death of SaaS has been exaggerated'.
The core point they came up with during an online seminar is:AIwill not killSaaSwith a single blow.
Because many SaaS products do not sell 'software code', but stable business process capabilities/operational delivery (reliability, security, integration, etc.), AI is more likely to expand the market and will not simply erode SaaS.
Another report from WSJ states that AI cannot kill the software industry, it will only end its growth myth.
It is somewhat unrealistic for large enterprises to use 'vibe coded apps' to replace highly complex software platforms.
These platforms carry core businesses such as payroll and IT management, requiring a deep understanding of the industry rather than just typing a few lines of code.
Of course, some netizens also believe that the demise of SaaS has been exaggerated.
Former Bill Gates' technical assistant, Office team member, and head Steven Sinofsky bluntly stated:
Software is dead. The concept of pure software games will disappear in a certain language model.
Nonsense.
The singularity has arrived, and humanity is beginning to hand over power
Throughout history, there have been instances of market pessimism towards the software industry.
When the "mobile Internet" became popular, a group of people predicted that Microsoft would die - everyone would use their mobile phones if they were still using PCs.
But in the past decade, Microsoft's stock price has risen by nearly 800%.
Bloomberg analyst Rana also said, "This is actually quite common in the software industry. When something really goes wrong, many companies are powerless
But this is not a simple stock market crash, it is the biggest value transfer in human economic history - the violent handover from "carbon based brains" to "silicon-based intelligence".
Google Genie publicly announced a 15% drop in gaming stocks within a week;
Video models such as Veo3 and Higgsfield replace human creators, forcing the SAG union to tax AI influencers and donate to the Human Actors Fund;
Fortune 500 companies cancel millions of dollars in software contracts and switch to AI intelligent agent platforms;
OpenAI and Anthropic collaborate with research institutions to launch trillion dollar markets for health function automation in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and research;
GPT-5.2 and Gemini solve mathematical problems, questioning the value of a mathematics degree.
Who can deny that AI has no economic benefits? Who would have thought that AI would take down the entire industry so quickly?
But this is not even the craziest part.
But that's not even the craziest, "the head of OpenAI Codex bluntly said," Codex can now build itself, we just need supervision. 」
The Anthropic team also expressed the same view to Claude: it can self improve.
We have entered a stage where AI not only disrupts human industries, but also begins to automate its own iterations.
We have crossed the invisible threshold - AI is no longer just disrupting human industries, it is beginning to automate its own iterations.
The accelerated integration of human and artificial cognition will ultimately come down to a cold equation: computing power x energy x silicon wafer.
In future history books, this may just be a short line: 'Anthropic releases Claude Cowork and Claude Code, marking the arrival of the singularity of mental labor automation.'. 」
