Investors have discovered a new fear – and it goes by the name of Claude. At the start of the week, a new security tool from Anthropic AI had a significant impact on numerous tech stocks.
• Anthropic introduced new security tool “Claude Code Security” on Friday
• Numerous tech stocks reacted with heavy losses
• AI has also caused tremors on the stock market in the past
When the AI company Anthropic presented its new security tool “Claude Code Security” shortly before the weekend, investors reacted the following Monday with significant sales in the IT and cybersecurity sector. The wave of sales hit companies whose business models are based on security analysis, monitoring or IT consulting particularly hard.
The shares of Zscaler and CrowdStrike then fell by around ten percent on the NASDAQ at the beginning of the week. Heavyweights such as Salesforce, Oracle and ServiceNow also came under pressure on the NYSE and ultimately lost around 3.8 percent, 4.6 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively, on Monday. However, IBM was hit the hardest: the share ultimately fell by 13.15 percent to $223.25 in Monday trading on the NYSE and, according to “dpa-AFX”, recorded its biggest daily loss since 2000. IBM is thus becoming a symbol of an industry that is suddenly confronted with a new form of competition.
What Claude Code Security is supposed to do
At the center of the violent market reaction in IT stocks is “Claude Code Security,” an AI-powered tool for the automated analysis of software code. According to Anthropic, the system is capable of scanning an entire code base and identifying security vulnerabilities that could escape classic, rule-based methods. Unlike traditional static analysis tools, AI is intended to not only detect known vulnerability patterns, but also understand the logic and interaction of program components and suggest patches for the identified vulnerabilities.
“The Hacker News” describes the tool as particularly powerful at identifying complex security issues arising from data flows or cross-system dependencies. The system also evaluates vulnerabilities found according to severity and trust probability and suggests concrete remediation measures. However, the final decision on changes remains with the developer – fully autonomous intervention is not planned.
In initial tests, Anthropic points to more than 500 discovered security gaps in open source projects, thereby underlining its claim to use AI as “security analysts”. “This is a pivotal moment for cybersecurity. We expect a significant portion of the world’s source code to be scanned by AI in the near future, as models have become very effective at finding long-hidden bugs and vulnerabilities,” the press release said. “Claude Code Security” is currently in a “limited testing phase […] for enterprise and team customers”. According to Anthropic, open source developers could also apply for free, accelerated access. It is currently unknown when the tool will be generally available.
Anthropic’s attack on a billion-dollar business model
However, the strong stock market reaction is probably explained less by the current performance or availability of the tool, but rather by its possible strategic importance. Cybersecurity and monitoring providers make their money by identifying, assessing and prioritizing risks – tasks that can be at least partially automated. If an AI model can do this work faster, cheaper and possibly more precisely, it calls into question the pricing power of established providers. The new Claude function could therefore represent a new challenge of increased competitive pressure, especially for cybersecurity companies such as Zscaler, which is active in the area of cloud security, and CrowdStrike, which focuses on endpoint security.
Investors were particularly sensitive to IBM, which, in addition to software, also operates a large consulting and integration business. If AI were to take on implementation and analysis tasks independently in the future, this could put traditional IT services under pressure. The question also arises for cloud and workflow specialists such as ServiceNow or Oracle as to whether AI will act as a higher-level intelligence layer in the future, partially replacing existing software or shifting its value creation.
At the same time, many of these companies are also investing heavily in AI integration themselves. The current price reaction probably also reflects a reassessment of long-term competitive advantages. Whether “Claude Code Security” will ultimately lead to a lasting shift in the cybersecurity market remains an open question. Established providers often integrate new technologies more quickly than initial market reactions would suggest. It is also conceivable that AI-supported security analysis does not replace existing solutions, but complements them.
AI repeatedly causes disruptions in the stock market
Since the rise of OpenAI and the market success of ChatGPT, every new product announcement from leading AI providers has been interpreted as a potential paradigm shift. The fact that Anthropic, an industry player, is now demonstrating how deeply AI can penetrate safety-critical company processes increases the uncertainty. But no matter how violent the reaction to the idea of “Claude Code Security” was, it does not represent a precedent. Anthropic has already triggered violent market movements in the past.
At the beginning of February, for example, the new Claude version “Opus 4.6” put pressure on the shares of financial analysis companies because, according to Anthropic, it could also take on financial analysis tasks. To do this, Claude evaluates company data, mandatory notifications and market information, the AI company continues. Stocks from FactSet, Thompson Reuters and Morningstar then turn deep red. Also Anthropic’s announcement of new AI-supported services for automated “contract reviews, the triage of non-disclosure agreements [NDAs]”Compliance workflows, legal briefings and standardized answers” had put numerous share certificates under pressure at the beginning of the month. The stock exchanges are apparently becoming more and more convinced that the promised leap in productivity through AI is getting closer.
Even earlier announcements such as financing rounds had only caused shifts within the AI ecosystem. For example, when Anthropic received billions in capital commitments, including from Amazon and Google, the markets viewed this primarily as a signal of the strategic importance of large language models. Cloud providers, for example, benefited due to an expected increase in demand for data centers or manufacturers of AI chips such as NVIDIA, which are considered the infrastructural winners of the AI boom.
Overall, price fluctuations in connection with AI breakthroughs are not unknown. The introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI already led to abrupt valuation adjustments in individual segments, for example in the education and software sectors. In all of these cases, the markets reacted less to concrete shifts in sales than to the prospect that value chains could change sustainably. This exact pattern now seems to be at work at Anthropic too.
Editorial team finanzen.net
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