US software stocks climb as Anthropic announcement sparks relief rally

Reuters

Updated Wed, February 25, 2026 at 1:56 AM GMT+9 2 min read

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ANTH.PVT

IBM

+3.14%

^GSPC

+0.66%

INTU

+0.28%

INTA

+5.44%

Feb 24 (Reuters) - Shares of U.S. software companies that entered into partnerships with AI startup Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) on Tuesday helped lead a rebound in ‌the sector that has been hammered by fears about the disruptive impact ‌of artificial intelligence.

Anthropic said it was developing new tools, the so-called “plug-ins”, with its partners that could ​help with investment banking, wealth management and HR tasks, including deal reviews, portfolio analysis and making new-hire materials reflect a brand’s tone and policies.

Shares of its partners, including LSEG (LSEG.L), FactSet (FDS), Salesforce’s (CRM) Slack, and DocuSign (DOCU), climbed between 0.4% and 5.3%.

The S&P 500 software & ‌services index also rose 1.4% ⁠and the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF jumped 2.4%.

The software index touched a 10-month low on Monday after Citrini Research laid ⁠out a 2028 scenario where unemployment rises to 10.2%, triggered by layoffs as AI rapidly turfs out software and delivery applications.

“Software stocks and the IGV particularly are just massively ​oversold. So ​any incremental news that we’re getting about ​more disruptions is like getting ‌to a point where how much is priced in already,” said Dennis Dick, chief market strategist at Stock Trader Network.

“Some of this disruption is not imminent and a lot of this is probably years out yet. The market’s telling us that now.”

A week-long selloff earlier this month wiped out about $1 trillion in market value ‌on Wall Street that analysts dubbed ‘Software-mageddon’ and hurt ​sectors spanning from software to logistics companies on ​both sides of the Atlantic and ​India.

Anthropic said on Monday its Claude Code tool could be ‌used to modernize a programming language ​run on IBM systems, ​resulting in the biggest daily drop in shares of the legacy company in more than 25 years. IBM shares were up 3.5% on Tuesday.

Tax-preparation software ​Intuit gained 2.8% and ‌AI-solutions provider Intapp climbed 7.1% after the companies announced separate partnerships with ​Anthropic on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Johann M Cherian, Sruthi Shankar and Purvi ​Agarwal in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

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