Neal Freiman

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Cable television, department stores, print newspapers, all once lucrative business models that ultimately bit the dust.

Could software be next?

It's the existential question everyone's asking as software companies get absolutely pummeled on the stock market this week.

There's widespread fear that new AI tools could automate tasks that previously required expensive software subscriptions, obliterating the value of the companies that sell them.

The meltdown started when Anthropic added new legal tools for its Claude cowork agent,

aiming to win over in-house lawyers.

Seems harmless enough, but on Tuesday morning, that triggered a major sell-off in legal and financial data firms like LegalZoom, Thomson Reuters, Equifax, and Intuit.

Those jitters later spread to the rest of the software industry, hitting names like Salesforce, Workday, SAP, and ServiceNow.

By the end of the day, software companies had lost $300 billion in value, and yesterday brought even more selling.

All told, an index tracking software stock has shed

nearly $1 trillion over the past seven days.

Some are calling it the saspocalypse, the beginning of the end for the software as a service industry.

Others say the fear of AI disruption is overdone and expect a bounce back once nerves have calmed.

No matter what, as Bloomberg writes, the vibes have gone from bearish to doomsday.

A JP Morgan analyst put it best, saying that we are now in an environment where the sector isn't just guilty until proven innocent, but is now being sentenced before trial.

Yeah, I'm going to dive into what some more analysts were saying because they were kind of popping off about this.