Shares of U.S. software companies that revealed partnerships with AI developer Anthropic climbed on Tuesday, helping push the beleaguered sector higher after recent heavy losses tied to concerns over artificial intelligence disruption.
Anthropic said it is working with a group of partners to build new tools, labeled "plug-ins", intended to support specific professional functions. The company said those plug-ins could assist with investment banking tasks like deal reviews, wealth management activities such as portfolio analysis, and HR-related duties including creating new-hire materials that reflect a company’s tone and policies.
Stocks of several named partners moved higher on the news. Shares of LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce’s Slack unit and DocuSign rose in a range between 0.4% and 5.3%. Broader measures of the software industry also advanced: the S&P 500 software & services index climbed 1.4%, while the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF jumped 2.4%.
The gains came after the software index had touched a 10-month low on Monday. That downturn followed a report from Citrini Research that outlined a 2028 scenario in which unemployment increases to 10.2% because of broad layoffs as AI displaces software and delivery applications. The shadow of that scenario had weighed on investor sentiment.
Dennis Dick, chief market strategist at Stock Trader Network, said the sector may have been oversold and that market pricing likely reflected a large portion of anticipated disruption. "Software stocks and the IGV particularly are just massively oversold. So any incremental news that we’re getting about more disruptions is like getting to a point where how much is priced in already," he said. "Some of this disruption is not imminent and a lot of this is probably years out yet. The market’s telling us that now."
Earlier in the week a rapid selloff across technology-related names erased roughly $1 trillion in market value on Wall Street, a decline that market commentators labeled "Software-mageddon" and that affected industries from software to logistics across the United States, Europe and India.
Anthropic also highlighted a separate application of its Claude Code tool on Monday, saying it could be used to modernize a programming language running on IBM systems. That disclosure coincided with a notable market move for the legacy technology company: IBM shares, which suffered their largest daily drop in more than 25 years on the prior development, were up 3.5% on Tuesday.
Other companies that announced partnerships with Anthropic saw positive moves as well. Tax-preparation software provider Intuit gained 2.8%, and AI-solutions vendor Intapp climbed 7.1% after confirming separate collaborations on Tuesday.
Overall, the Anthropic partnership announcements provided a catalyst for short-term relief in a sector that had been sharply repriced amid concerns about AI-driven displacement of jobs and applications.