Why Software Firms Are Panicking Over Claude's Latest Move

Hello,

This is Simon with the latest edition of The Weekly. In these updates, I share key AI related stories from this week's news, list upcoming events, and share any longer form articles posted on the website.

This week, shares in a large number of software companies, tech advisors and management firms took a huge nosedive after Anthropic announced an update to its Claude Cowork platform that would enable users to manage far more of their professional work. The update involved creating plugins for specific industries, such as law, marketing and sales, giving users key skills in those areas. Stocks plummeted as the industry is asking: why use professional services firms or software when Claude can now do a vast amount of the job instead?

Claude's Cowork tool has instantly moved the goalposts as it's been one of the first tools that can be given access to your desktop and permissions to create and edit documents on your behalf. This functionality is enabling it to become a true assistant. If you want all of the photos on your hard drive that relate to an individual client moved into a specific folder, Claude can do that for you. Or if you want to trawl through all of your Excel files and find references to a specific project, Claude can do that.

All of this development certainly poses quite a few questions for the workforce. Whilst I doubt any corporate lawyer is suddenly going to use Claude to write their new customer contracts, many people will turn to the system to get an idea if they should go ahead and make a legal complaint without incurring initial legal fees, for example.

And with anything AI-generated, there are still loads of questions about accountability and who's responsible when things go wrong.

I think it's clear that technology is moving faster than human society can keep up. Legal frameworks, societal norms and job markets are struggling to keep pace with this incessant change. Whilst there haven't been any huge disasters yet, how long will it be before we see a truly fundamental step change in our society where human lives are impacted by the rise of AI?

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In this section, I’m going to bring to you a real world example of AI use, and this week, we take a look at how AI is being used in the legal profession…

Several prominent AI leaders, including executives from major AI labs, are sounding the alarm about AI’s potential harms (from job disruption to misuse), yet the same companies are racing forward with new products and investment. This tug-of-war highlights the tension between innovation and caution in the AI industry

Why it matters: Even tech leaders who are set to make huge gains from AI disagree on how fast AI should move.

Researchers are reporting an influx of low-quality academic work written or heavily assisted by AI, sometimes with incorrect or fake data. Major scientific conferences are now cracking down. This shows that AI isn’t magically good at everything, and misuse even harms scientific progress.

Why it matters: It’s a real-world downside of easy access to powerful AI tools, a cautionary tale about quality over hype.

A weird new platform called Moltbook launched, where AI agents (not humans) can post, comment, upvote and interact with content much like Reddit, but for bots. Experts are watching how this kind of autonomous AI interaction changes our assumptions about social media and AI behaviour.

Why it matters: It’s a real example of agents acting without humans controlling every move, which is fascinating and slightly unsettling.

Thanks for reading, and see you next Friday.

Simon,

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