Did Anthropic Just Give Investors Another “DeepSeek Moment?”
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What recent events have impacted software stocks in 2026?
software companies' terrible, no good, very bad day. This is Motley Fool Money.
Welcome to Motley Fool Money. My name is Tyler Burrow, and today I'm joined by longtime contributors, Matt Frankel and John Quest. Guys, sometimes decades happen and nothing happens, and sometimes decades happen in a month. Yes, I'm using a Lennon quote on an investing podcast, but it really does feel like that this week because it has been a busy one. We're going to talk about jobs numbers. We may make a couple of cracks at Google's earnings and their stock going down today, but we're going to start
What is the significance of Anthropic's launch of Claude Cowork?
with software companies, especially SaaS companies, and a lot of things that's been going on in that space recently. It was right around this time last year when we were talking about AI having this deep-seat moment. Investors were terrified that a Chinese company had built some impressive AI algorithms that ran on commodity hardware and were much more efficient than some of the AI models that we were seeing from OpenAI. Well, this week, software companies, I think, had what we could call their anthropic moment.
How did the DeepSeek Moment affect investor perceptions?
That's when AI company Anthropic launched Claude Cowork. It's an AI tool designed to replace many software tools on the market today. Just to give some examples of the software companies that were reeling from this, over the past week, shares of Shopify are down 23%. Monday.com and Fastly are down 15%. Bill Holdings down 16%. This is all as we're recording today.
What are the different types of software companies discussed?
I could keep going. The list is long. This is just a brief encapsulation of what we've seen at a lot of software and SaaS companies in the last few weeks and months. I want to put this to both of you. With the deep-seek moment that we had last year, it seemed to have passed. AI spending is exploding, and meta, alphabet, all these companies are full steam ahead, and there doesn't seem to be as many issues as we thought about a year ago. Will this anthropic moment for software have a similar result, or are there deeper concerns for these companies?
First of all, Tyler, I love the Lennon quote you pulled out. I feel like New Year's Day was seven months ago, and it was one month ago. We're in a very slow time period right now. The answer to your question is, it depends if this is another deep-seek moment or not. I really think the risk here varies based on the type of software company we're talking about. In some ways, it could be an overreaction. In some ways, it could be legitimate concerns. I think of software stocks in three baskets, I guess I'd say. One, there's the massive and deep-pocketed software leaders. Think like Microsoft in that case. They're not going anywhere.
Which stocks are considered safe amidst the current market turmoil?
Then there are what I call the ecosystem companies, the ones that are mission-critical for their customers and are just so rooted into their customers' business. Shopify is a great example of that from the stocks that you just mentioned. And then there are the software companies that essentially do one thing, sometimes they do it really well, but essentially perform one function for a business that not only the business would be fine without, but if Claude Cowart could make an AI-driven alternative, they wouldn't feel any difference. Not that these companies are going to go away or anything, but HubSpot and Atlassian, those are down way, way off the highs. Those are two examples I'd put in that third basket.
Now, I don't think AI is going to completely destroy any of them. As earnings trickle out over the next couple of weeks, we're going to get some really valuable insights from CEOs who are almost guaranteed to get questions about all this in their conference calls. But my general feeling is that the more mission-critical a software company is to its customers, and the more different things that it does, the better off that it's going to be in this anthropic moment, as you put it.
Yeah, this anthropic moment is really fascinating because on the one hand, this is what everyone has been saying all along, ever since AI really started to take hold of the headlines, that it was going to replace certain softwares.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What recent events have impacted software stocks in 2026?
0:05–0:48
2
What is the significance of Anthropic's launch of Claude Cowork?
0:48–1:16
3
How did the DeepSeek Moment affect investor perceptions?
1:16–1:40
4
What are the different types of software companies discussed?
1:40–2:56
5
Which stocks are considered safe amidst the current market turmoil?
2:56–4:23
6
How is the job market shifting due to AI and economic factors?
4:23–6:47
7
What investment strategies should be considered in a volatile market?
6:47–8:42
8
Which stocks are on the radar for potential investment opportunities?
8:42–20:42