Anthropic, one of the biggest and most influential tech companies in the world, is launching a new model: Claude Opus 4.6.
Until now, this would mostly be big news for techies, where Anthropic is admired as the maker of Claude Code, the code-writing AI tool which many engineers say is taking over their work entirely.
All of a sudden, however, the impact of these tools is being felt more widely, after a seemingly small release from Anthropic shook some sections of the stock market.
Earlier this week, Anthropic released a plug-in to their Claude chatbot, which added new tools for legal analysis.
This relatively minor update sent shares of several large legal data firms tumbling. Thomson Reuters, which owns legal database Westlaw, fell nearly 16%. Analytics company RELX fell 12%.
This may seem strange to outsiders because Anthropic is still relatively unknown outside the world of tech.
A poll by US research firm Blue Rose Research at the end of last year found that it was known by less than 5% of the population.
But analysts say that market participants, impressed by the advances in coding, are starting to wonder if the same gains can be made in other sectors.
“The market’s in seek and destroy mode,” says James Sym, partner at London-based equity firm Goodhart.
“It’s just trying to find the next loser from AI. That’s what you’ve seen in the last couple of days.”
Anthropic’s latest release may add to this sense of urgency, because it is directly aimed at knowledge workers.
As well as a number of improvements to coding – the ability to handle large codebases, for instance, and longer tasks – the new model is designed to deal with the kind of problems non-coders face in apps such as Excel and PowerPoint, where Claude will now be able to work directly.
“Users can build slides from a corporate template, restructure a storyline, convert bullets…
