Explained: Why Anthropic’s new AI tool is spooking India’s IT services industry

A new automation push from Anthropic is rattling investors in India’s $250-billion IT services industry, triggering a sharp selloff in major software exporters and reviving concerns that AI could reshape traditional outsourcing work faster than expected.

Shares of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Tech Mahindra fell as much as 6% in early trade on 4 February, underscoring growing anxiety over pricing pressure and future demand. In the US, peers Accenture and Cognizant dropped about 9% on 3 February, highlighting how the selloff has spread across global IT names.

At the center of the market jitters is Anthropic’s new enterprise automation offering.

What Anthropic launched

In January, Anthropic rolled out an agentic product called Claude Cowork agent for corporate customers. Days later, the startup expanded its capabilities with 11 new plug-ins designed to automate everyday business tasks and connect Claude’s AI directly with common enterprise tools.

The plug-ins are built to work across departments such as legal, sales, marketing and data analysis, helping companies streamline workflows by linking chat, email, calendars, knowledge bases and project trackers.

Anthropic says enterprises can customise these plug-ins to match their own processes. Companies can build, edit and share them internally without needing deep technical expertise, making the system easier to deploy across large teams.

In practical terms, this means Claude can help manage daily tasks, plan schedules and retain work context through its productivity tools. Project management features cover everything from drafting product requirement documents to prioritising roadmaps. Marketing plug-ins can generate content, plan campaigns and track performance. Similar automation is available for finance, legal work, customer support, enterprise search, data analytics and even biological research.

Why markets are worried

For investors, the concern is simple, tools like these could reduce the need for large teams doing repetitive or process-driven work.

While automation has long been part of the industry, AI agents that can plan tasks, pull data, generate documents and coordinate workflows raise the stakes. 

The development weighed on information technology stocks, with American depository receipts of Infosys falling 5.56% overnight to $17.32, while Wipro ADRs fell 4.83% to $2.56, stoking concerns of a selloff in Indian IT shares during domestic trade.

Global equities were under pressure as well. The Nasdaq Composite declined 1.43% to settle at 23,255.19, while the S&P 500 fell 0.84% to 6,917.81.