LSEG, Sage, Rightmove shares fall as Anthropic AI rattles markets
Shares in global software giants tumbled again on Wednesday morning as the latest AI innovation from Anthropic rattled global markets.
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) extended Tuesday’s losses falling near two per cent in early trading to lows of 6,774.00p before clawing back some gains. Meanwhile Rightmove led the index’s fallers, with a slump of over six per cent to 444.40. Sage was down over three per cent to 842.53p.
Despite the losses, the FTSE 100 still managed to pull ahead rising by 1.2 per cent in later trading and breaking the 10,400 mark. This was mainly led by a major nine per cent surge from Beazley on its blockbuster takeover and an eight per cent rally from DCC after an upbeat earnings update.
Information-based analytics firm Relx – which is in the top 20 of the City’s most valuable blue-chips – had over £6bn wiped from its market value with a fall of over 16 per cent on Tuesday. The firm managed to eke out a gain in Wednesday’s early trading, up a modest 0.3 per cent.
“RELX has a large presence in the legal space and was in the teeth of the resulting storm. It was among several names to endure double-digit declines as investors weighed the wider implications.
“To what extent AI can disintermediate traditional data analytics and software firms is not yet clear, but a lot of investors weren’t sticking around to find out,” said Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell.
Coatsworth said “concerningly” for the day’s fallers there was “little sign of a share price recovery today, with bargain hunters not tempted to step in.”
US markets slide on Anthropic blow
Looking to he other side of the pond, tech stocks fell broadly on Wall Street overnight, with the Nasdaq sliding 1.4 per cent, the S&P 500 down 0.8 per cent and the Dow Jones easing 0.3 per cent as most of the so-called Magnificent Seven tech giants moved lower.
Asian markets were mixed on Wednesday morning, with Japan’s Nikkei pulling back from recent highs while Chinese and Hong Kong equities traded higher.
The falls came after US AI giant Anthropic unveiled a new tool aimed at automating legal work for corporate in-house teams.
The product, launched by the company behind the Claude chatbot, is designed to carry out tasks that have historically underpinned revenues at many data-heavy businesses.
The £350bn company’s co-founder Dario Amodei warned last month in a 20,000 word essay that the development of AI will “test who we are as a species”.
He predicted that “it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything”.