Anthropic AI tool impact: Infosys shares suffer biggest fall in more than 2 years

Shares of the Indian IT sector saw a steep decline on Wednesday, with heavyweights such as Infosys and TCS taking a massive hit following concerns about Anthropic's new offerings. Infosys, India's second-largest IT firm, plunged over 8 per cent, marking its steepest decline in over two years and six months.

At 12:22 pm, shares of Infosys plunged 8.23 per cent to trade at Rs 1518.80 on the BSE, a sharp drop against its previous close of Rs 1,654.95. This marks the most steepest single-day fall for Infosys since May 21, 2023. On that date, the Infosys stock slipped as much as 9.4 per cent to touch an intraday low of Rs 1,304.24 on BSE before eventually settling 8.18 per cent lower at Rs 1,322.94 apiece against its May 20, 2023, close of Rs 1,440.72.

This eroded significant investor wealth, as the Infosys market capitalisation plunged by over Rs 54,000 crore, bringing its total market cap down to Rs 6.31 lakh crore, BSE data showed.

“I think what has really transpired late last night is that Anthropic has probably developed some sort of new AI automation tool. And there is concern in the market that it will eat into the core business of data and information services firms,” said Mayuresh Joshi, Head of Equity Research at William O Neil India.

Other IT major shares also plunged. TCS was down 6.50 per cent to Rs 3,014 apiece, while Tech Mahindra dropped 5.79 per cent to trade at Rs 1,616.35.

The BSE IT index was down 6.21 per cent to 34,844.43

The effect was felt overnight in the US markets, where the tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped 1.43 per cent to close at 23,255.19.

“So I believe data processing firms, which make up a sizable portion of the Indian IT ecosystem, will be impacted. But it's not just IT stocks. Look at what happened to US stocks overnight. Atlassian, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Gartner, and Accenture stocks were all significantly lower,” Joshi said.

Anthropic recently launched plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent, a move designed to automate tasks across legal, sales, marketing, and data analysis functions.

While these plug-ins work across various use cases, they are reportedly powerful in tailoring Anthropic’s Claude to specific job functions such as sales, legal and financial analysis.

VK Vijayakumar, Chief Investment Strategist at Geojit Investments Limited, noted that the rally fuelled by the US-India trade deal will face hurdles to sustain.

"The IT selloff in the US yesterday will drag the Indian IT index, too, constraining the rally in the Indian market. Since valuations continue to be high there is no fundamental support for a sustained rally," Vijayakumar added.