Anthropic Announcement Wipes Value Off Data Stocks

Data stocks took a beating with news of new functionality released in Claude Cowork for legal research. 

Claude is the invention of Anthropic, the AI company founded in 2021 by ex Open AI employees, including San Francisco-born Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei.

Big investors in Anthropic include Amazon, who invested $4bn in 2023, later doubling this in 2024. Anthropic uses AWS for cloud provision.

On Wednesday 4 February, Gartner stock dropped over 20%, as did IP-management software firm Clarivate. NIQ Global Intelligence, formerly Nielsen IQ, that provides consumer insights, also dropped almost 20%.

Gartner's cousin, Forrester, dropped 12%, potentially as its business decline was already priced in. FactSet dropped 10%.

S&P Global dropped 11.2%. That is despite historical investments in AI, including Kensho in 2018. Kensho specialized in NLP and machine learning for financial data.  Some of S&P's current work involves interfacing with LLMs - a product win for S&P but a not a financial one - that cash goes to AI companies.

LSEG dropped 9.72%. Around 60% of their revenue can be said to be data-driven revenue, coming from the Data and Analytics segment. The rest comes largely from trading services.