How Anthropic’s Claude Cowork shook the markets?

On 3 February 2026, a sharp fall in IT stocks nearly erased Rs 2 lakh crore from the market value of the Nifty IT index. This downturn majorly affected the big names in the IT services industry, including TCS, Infosys, HCLTech and Wipro. The share prices falling between 4% and 8% is being called a market reaction, followed by the release of 11 open source plugins from Anthropic’s Claude Cowork platform.

Traditionally, IT service providers like TCS and Infosys operate on a billable hours model. They provide human labour to manage complex business processes, data migration, and software maintenance. Until recently, artificial intelligence served as a tool to help these employees work faster.

Claude Cowork matches traditional service providers through several technical features. The system breaks large projects into smaller tasks and runs multiple sub-agents in parallel to finish work faster than a human team.

Unlike standard web-based AI, Cowork runs in a sandbox environment on the user’s machine. This allows it to handle large files without the size limits of the chat window. The plugins allow the AI to interact with CRMs, internal databases, and professional software, performing the stitching work that IT consultants usually handle.

Anthropic is changing the revenue staples

Anthropic, with its recent launch, Claude Cowork has changed the dynamics by moving from a chat interface to an agentic model that does not just suggest how to perform a task; it also executes the work directly on a user’s computer.

It can access file systems, run terminal commands, and use virtual machines to complete multi-step workflows without constant human oversight.

Financial analysts at Jefferies and JPMorgan have labelled this event a “SaaSpocalypse.” The concern is that Anthropic owns the workflow. Previously, companies like Thomson Reuters or Salesforce built software on top of AI models. Now, Anthropic provides the ready-made vertical solutions itself.

And in such scenarios, when an AI agent can perform end-to-end tasks, it stops being a product enhancer and becomes a labour substitute. For companies whose value rests on managing human effort and fragmented systems, this reduces the need for large vendor teams.

How industry react to this?

Industry leaders, including Wipro and Infosys, have noted that while AI handles routine tasks, a gap remains for large-scale enterprise transformation. Traditional providers may need to pivot away from minor coding and routine maintenance, toward high-level governance and complex integration.

Anthropic maintains that its tools require human review, especially in legal and financial contexts. However, the speed of iteration is notable. Cowork launched in mid-January, and its vertical plugins arrived less than three weeks later. This pace challenges the quarterly release cycles typical of large software and service firms.