- Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, an AI tool to replace multiple software applications
- Claude Cowork can read, organize files, draft documents, and assist with legal tasks
- The AI tool caused a sell-off in US tech, Indian IT, and European legal software stocks
Anthropic has introduced Claude Cowork, a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool with the capability to replace dozens of other software. Meant to be like an AI colleague, it can read files, organise folders and even draft documents. The American AI firm's announcement rattled global stock markets and led to a major sell-off across US technology firms, Indian IT stocks and legal software companies in Europe.
Anthropic's New AI Tool
In Cowork, once you give Claude access to a folder on your computer, it can read, edit, or create files. It can reorganise your downloads by sorting or renaming each of them. It can create a new spreadsheet to carry a list of expenses from a pile of screenshots or even generate the first draft of a report from the scattered notes.
Claude Opus 4.6 model, which was announced on Thursday, has been specifically designed to make Cowork AI better for office and coding work, CNN reported.
The new tool can handle routine legal work, including contract checks, non-disclosure agreement reviews and legal summaries. Further, it can perform standard drafting tasks. Cowork functions like a plugin for in-house legal teams.
The tool does not provide legal advice, and lawyers are suggested to review any AI-generated content before using it, the company said.
Industry leaders react
The launch of Claude Cowork has sent software stocks into a spiral and raised concerns that it could replace specialised packages that companies use for these tasks.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was questioned about the prospects of AI disrupting the existing software companies at an AI conference hosted by Cisco. Refuting the claims, Huang said it was the "most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself.”
"If you were a human or robot, artificial, general robotics, would you use tools or reinvent tools? The answer, obviously, is to use tools," Reuters quoted Huang as saying.
Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu said the stock market is becoming "very negative about the prospects of SaaS companies in the AI-assisted Code era."
"Well, before the AI revolution, I have said the SaaS industry is ripe for consolidation. An industry that spends vastly more on sales and marketing than on engineering and product development was always vulnerable. The venture capital bubble and then the stock market bubble funded a fundamentally flawed, unsustainable model for too long. AI is the pin that is popping this inflated balloon," he wrote on X.
On the question about Zoho surviving the AI wave, Vembu said this depends on the company's ability to adapt. "I always ask our employees to calmly contemplate our death. When we accept that possibility, we become more fearless and that is when we can calmly chart our course," he added.
Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar believes that the claims regarding an AI model to be plugged into an enterprise to generate output like magic are "highly misplaced".
Addressing a press conference on the quarterly earnings for the company, Kumar said, "If that's the case, why hasn't the value drifted into enterprises in the last three years, particularly after the launch of ChatGPT."
