US stocks: Anthropic touts new AI tools, weeks after legal plugin put pressure on the market

Artificial intelligence laboratory Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled 10 new ways for enterprise customers to connect their technology to key areas of their work, weeks after other releases sparked an aggressive sell-off in shares of traditional software companies.The San Francisco-based startup said the plug-ins can now help with investment banking tasks such as deal review, asset management tasks such as portfolio analysis, and HR-related tasks such as creating materials for new hires that reflect a brand’s tone and policies.

Other items Anthropic touted included plug-ins for private equity, engineering and design.Anthropic said the new plugins were developed with partners including LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce’s Slack and DocuSign.

Companies such as Thomson Reuters, which owns the Reuters news agency, and RBC Wealth Management used AI agents powered by Anthropic, the report said.

The announcement sent shares of Anthropic’s partner companies soaring: Salesforce rose 4%, FactSet 5% and DocuSign nearly 6%.

Backed by Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com, the lab said it is releasing ways to connect its Claude AI to a number of commonly used business tools such as Google Calendar and Gmail. This year’s rapid releases demonstrate how Anthropic aims to be at the forefront of selling autonomous AI to the lucrative enterprise market ahead of a widely expected public offering.

Anthropic faces competition from Google itself, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, among others. The startup has said it has not yet decided to go public.

Last month, Anthropic’s release of a legal plugin triggered a global sell-off of $830 billion in software and services stocks, including some of the startup’s partners, over six trading days as investors worried that AI-powered automation could undermine these companies’ revenue streams.

Scott White, Anthropic’s head of product for enterprise, said the goal was for Claude to deliver better results for customers, not replace them.

“It’s not a product that tries to control every workflow,” he said in an interview. “We provide infrastructure and intelligence so that our partners or our customers can bring their business knowledge, their expertise, their trusted relationships and their customers into the equation.”

Companies can also build and manage their own plugins, Anthropic said.