Anthropic Takes Down $2 Trillion USD SaaS – Has the Software Era Ended?

Today, Anthropic is hosting a major corporate event in New York. Announcing a new product for Claude. The last three product launches have wiped out billions of dollars from the software stock market.

One of them wiped out $285 billion in just 48 hours. Here’s how a company destroyed $2 trillion in software market capitalization: On January 30, Anthropic quietly released 11 plugins for Claude Cowork. Legal, sales, finance, marketing, customer support, product management, etc. All they did was a blog post. 48 hours later, $285 billion in market cap disappeared. – Thomson Reuters: -16% (worst day in company history) – LegalZoom: -20% – Salesforce: -7% – ServiceNow: -7% – Adobe: -7% – RELX (LexisNexis): -14% Traders at Jefferies called it: “SaaS Doomsday.” Why is the market panicking? Because Claude not only improves workflows… but it also REPLACES THEM. Old model: companies pay per user. 100 employees = 100 Salesforce licenses. New model: 10 AI agents do the work of 100 people. That’s a 90% revenue collapse for every SaaS company charging per user. Then came the second wave, on February 20. Anthropic launched Claude Code Security, an AI that scans entire source codebases for security vulnerabilities. In internal tests, they found over 500 security flaws in open-source projects, some hidden for decades. One blog post, 1 hour. Just cybersecurity stocks lost $15 billion. CrowdStrike: -8% Cloudflare: -8% Okta: -9% SailPoint: -9.4% JFrog: -25% And it’s not over. On Monday, February 23, cybersecurity stocks continued to fall for the second straight day. CrowdStrike dropped a total of 11.6%. Zscaler fell 11.3%. CrowdStrike’s CEO spent the weekend publicly defending the company. When a CEO has to speak out to defend a tool still in “preliminary research,” that says everything you need to know. Jefferies just downgraded Workday and DocuSign. Shares of Workday and DocuSign have fallen 30-55% since January. The iShares Software ETF (IGV) has dropped 32% from its September peak, the worst quarterly decline since the 2008 financial crisis. – Oracle: -56% from peak – Microsoft: -26% – Palantir: -35% Software is the worst-performing sector in the S&P 500 in 2026. But what most people are missing is: Wall Street is not only revaluing software stocks but also revaluing the entire SaaS business model. The story has shifted from “AI helps software companies” to “AI IS the software company.” Interfaces are no longer the value; the new result is the value. If an AI agent can take data, write reports, review contracts, and scan code without human opening an app, what are you paying for a subscription? If the last three product launches caused billions of dollars in sell-offs, imagine what a major corporate announcement could do. Meanwhile, the numbers behind Anthropic are astonishing. – Raised $30 billion at a valuation of $380 billion. – Annual revenue reaches $14 billion. – Just Claude Code generates $2.5 billion in annual revenue. – Enterprise subscriptions have quadrupled since January. Bank of America pointed out the ultimate irony: Investors are punishing large cloud computing companies for AI spending that may not be profitable, while simultaneously destroying software stocks because AI will succeed so much it will replace everything. Both cannot be true at the same time. One of these moves is completely wrong. We are witnessing a complete revaluation of the perceived value of cognitive labor. The SaaS model that has dominated the tech industry for 20 years is being dismantled by a company that didn’t even exist five years ago.