The software industry is bleeding value at an unprecedented rate. Anthropic's Friday launch of enterprise AI plugins for its Claude Cowork platform has accelerated a brutal selloff that's wiped out nearly 30% of the sector's value in just three months. HubSpot has cratered 39% year-to-date, Figma plunged 40%, and even giants like Salesforce are down 25% as Wall Street decides AI will devour traditional software companies whole.
Anthropic just dropped a bomb on the software industry, and the shrapnel is still flying. The AI startup's Friday announcement of new legal, finance and product marketing capabilities for Claude Cowork - released as open-source plugins - has sent software stocks into freefall. The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund plummeted 6.5% this week alone, capping a brutal 20% decline in 2026.
The carnage is hitting companies across the board. HubSpot shares have collapsed 39% this year after sliding 42% in 2025. Figma is down 40%, Atlassian dropped 35%, and Shopify fell 29%. Even Box, whose CEO Aaron Levie calls this "the most exciting moment we've ever had" in the company's 20-year history, is nursing a 17% loss in 2026.
Wall Street's thesis is simple and brutal - foundation model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI will eat the software industry's lunch. Why pay for specialized software when Claude or ChatGPT can handle legal documents, financial analysis and marketing copy with a few text prompts? Celso Pinto, senior director of product at The Access Group, captured the shift in a Monday X post: "I am in awe of this technology," he wrote, describing how he's used Cowork and Claude Code to review marketing materials, fix bugs and produce legal documents.
But software executives are fighting back against the doomsday narrative. Levie told Wednesday that investors fundamentally misunderstand how businesses actually operate. "It somewhat misunderstands this idea of where companies tend to spend their resources and their time and their energy," he said. His argument - companies would rather pay specialized vendors for back office software and CRM systems than build and maintain everything themselves with all the liability that entails.
