Anthropic Just Destroyed an Entire Industry in 3 Weeks

$1 Trillion Gone. Wall Street Has a Name For It.

What Happened

February 3 — Anthropic launches Claude Cowork with legal automation plugins. Document review, risk flagging, NDA triage, compliance tracking — all handled by AI. Thomson Reuters drops 16%. London Stock Exchange Group drops 13%. $285–300 billion wiped in 48 hours.

February 21 — Anthropic unveils Claude Code Security. Cybersecurity stocks tank.

February 23 — Anthropic announces Claude Code for COBOL modernization. IBM crashes 13% — its worst single-day drop since 2000. Down 27% in February alone.

See the pattern?

Anthropic is going industry by industry, announcing AI can do their jobs. Each announcement triggers a new wave of selling.

The Scoreboard

Short sellers have pocketed ~$20–24 billion in 2026 so far.

Why This Is Happening

SaaS has been priced on a per-seat model for 20 years.

More employees = more licenses = more revenue.

AI agents don't need seats.

A company with 500 customer support licenses deploys AI agents. Same output, 50 licenses. That's a 90% seat reduction. That's not a growth slowdown — that's structural revenue destruction.

As Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu put it:

The SaaS value proposition was always: "We built a complex tool, you need to learn it, pay per user."

AI's value proposition: "Just tell me what you want in English."

The complexity moat just evaporated.

What Smart People Are Saying

The "it's overblown" camp:

• Jensen Huang (Nvidia): "There's this notion that the tool industry is in decline and will be replaced by AI. It is the most illogical thing in the world."

• Sam Altman (OpenAI): "It's different, it's definitely not dead... I think it's just going to be volatile for a while."

• JPMorgan: Selloff has "gone far enough" — historic buying opportunity on names down 25%+.

• Dan Ives (Wedbush): Called beaten-down software a "generational opportunity."

The "this is real" camp:

• Sridhar Vembu (Zoho): Tells his own employees to "consider the possibility of the company's death."

• Citi & Piper Sandler: Sweeping downgrades across SaaS.

• Morgan Stanley: Warns of deteriorating debt outlook across the software industry.

The Big Picture

This is what happens when Wall Street reads the METR graph.

METR — the AI safety research org — shows AI can now handle 14.5 hours of autonomous work. If that's true, why would you pay per-seat for 500 humans?

The SaaSpocalypse is the market pricing in the exponential.

"Software is dead" is wrong. But "software pricing is dead" might be right. The companies that survive will pivot from per-seat to per-outcome, from human licenses to agent capacity. They'll look nothing like today's SaaS.

The ones that don't adapt? Wall Street is already telling you what happens to them.

Winners in the Wreckage

Not everything is getting destroyed. Look for:

• AI infrastructure — Nvidia, Palantir, TSMC benefit regardless

• Cybersecurity — AI increases the attack surface. More agents = more threats. CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Zscaler are net beneficiaries.

• Companies with proprietary data AI can't access

• Network-effect platforms that connect multiple parties

Anthropic itself? Now valued at $380 billion after a $30B Series G. Hyperscalers are spending $660–690 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 — nearly doubling 2025. Much of that redirected from enterprise software budgets.

The SaaSpocalypse isn't a crash. It's a repricing. And it's just getting started.

Yours Truly,

Wes “I Hope You’re Not Surprised By This” Roth