Stocks broadly sank on Tuesday as investors moved to dump shares of software companies amid fears that artificial intelligence tools could eat into those companies’ businesses.<\/p>\n
On the S&P 500, the technology sector was by far the worst performer, leading the index to end the day lower by 0.8%. The Nasdaq Composite, which contains more technology companies, tumbled 1.4%.<\/p>\n
The selling came after AI startup Anthropic on Friday announced <\/a>an automated agent that could complete legal, data analytics, finance and sales tasks. Analysts said Friday’s little-noticed announcement broke through on Tuesday after a legal industry publication<\/a> flagged the tool’s capability on Monday evening. <\/p>\n \u201cWhile the leading AI labs have been innovating at a healthy clip for years, the pace of recent developments at Anthropic has been particularly notable,\u201d analysts at JPMorgan Chase said on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n They noted that Anthropic recently said that Claude Code, its AI agent that can write computer code, “grew from a research preview to a billion-dollar product in six months.”<\/p>\n Shares of Salesforce.com sold off by nearly 7% while shares of data provider Thomson Reuters dropped 16%. Real estate data provider CoStar fell 15% and the London Stock Exchange Group, a major supplier of stock market data tools, plunged 12%. <\/p>\n “While still early and preliminary with the product, this adds to investors\u2019 fear that AI-native companies will be able to break into the legal tech space and compete with larger players,” Morgan Stanley’s Toni Kaplan said. <\/p>\n Other data-related companies also slid. QuickBooks owner Intuit, S&P Global, credit data firm Equifax, HR systems provider Workday and enterprise software company Atlassian all fell by around 10%. <\/p>\n Also pushing the Nasdaq lower was PayPal, which reported lackluster earnings and a CEO change on Tuesday morning. Shares of the $40 billion company were lower by more than 20%. <\/p>\n Bitcoin also faced steep selling. <\/p>\n The world’s largest cryptocurrency plunged as much as 6.7% to its lowest level since President Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024. It recovered later in the day but was still down more than 2% to trade around $76,600.<\/p>\n Once a skeptic of crypto, Trump was wooed by the industry during the last presidential campaign and was expected to be a boon for digital currencies. Trump and his family also launched multiple crypto products themselves.<\/p>\n But over the last year, bitcoin is now down more than 24%. Since Jan. 1, it’s lost more than 12% of its value, amid a broader investor shift away from assets considered more risky than mainstream currencies and companies.<\/p>\n It wasn’t all doom and gloom on Wall Street, though. <\/p>\n Shares of Palantir, a darling of the AI boom, powered higher by more than 6% after the company reported earnings on Monday night that beat traders’ expectations. <\/p>\n Energy stocks also broadly traded higher, as did stocks in the consumer staples sector. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stocks broadly sank on Tuesday as investors moved to dump shares of software companies amid fears that artificial intelligence tools could eat into those companies’ businesses. On the S&P 500, the technology sector was by far the worst performer, leading the index to end the day lower by 0.8%. The Nasdaq Composite, which contains more <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5250","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marketsfortress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}