Claude just kicked the legs out from the analysts’ cosy little data racket.
For years analystis would hoard mountains of financial data and flog it to the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street for a premium, then Anthropic turned up.
Shares in S&P Global, MSCI, Intercontinental Exchange, London Stock Exchange Group and FactSet all sank this week after the AI startup rolled out new tools to automate legal work.
Anthropic’s new legal plug-in for its Cowork assistant, powered by its Claude model, is not even aimed at financial data, but panic does not need logic.
London Stock Exchange Group, which has spent years pivoting from running exchanges to selling data and analytics, slid 13 per cent on Tuesday before edging lower on Wednesday.
S&P Global and FactSet took double-digit hits on Tuesday, while Intercontinental Exchange and MSCI both dropped more than five per cent. The move was a loud reminder that AI disruption is not just coming for blue-collar jobs, it is coming for the people with expensive suits and even pricier billing rates.
A Claude-based coding tool has already rattled software engineers in recent months and now the legal kit is doing the same to lawyers. It slapped companies running legal research databases, including Thomson Reuters, because nothing says “innovation” like nuking someone else’s margins.
UBS, analyst Michael Werner said: “The market has cast a broad net as to which companies can be exposed to AI risk. You don’t have to be in the crosshairs of this particular AI risk. You can be in the periphery.”
The knock-on selling spread into other software areas, such as outsourcing, where AI could reduce the need for human consultants. In India, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services both fell around seven per cent on Wednesday.
Investors had already been going cold on software since late last year, well before this week’s drama. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Exchange-Traded Fund peaked in September and was already down nearly a quarter before Tuesday’s fall.
Not everyone is buying the doom trade. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said late Tuesday: “Would you use a hammer or invent a new hammer? There’s a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure because somehow AI is going to replace them. It is the most illogical thing in the world.”
Financial data providers still argue they have a moat because their value comes from proprietary feeds and access that bankers and traders rely on. S&P Global has its credit ratings franchise and sells everything from stock indexes to oil price feeds to insurance analytics, and its shares rose more than fivefold in the decade ending 2025, while its own S&P 500 index roughly tripled.
The sector spent years bulking up on subscriptions, with operators chasing stable recurring revenue. London Stock Exchange Group splashed out on Refinitiv Holdings to take a swing at Bloomberg’s terminal empire, while Intercontinental Exchange pushed into bonds, mortgages and trading signals mined from Reddit chatter.
Some of these firms insist AI should make them more valuable by squeezing more insight from their raw data.
