[HN Gopher] Anthropic AI tool sparks selloff from software to br...
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       Anthropic AI tool sparks selloff from software to broader market
        
       Author : garbawarb
       Score  : 60 points
       Date   : 2026-02-03 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
        
       | XiS wrote:
       | https://archive.li/VyN2H
        
       | epicureanideal wrote:
       | Could this lead to more software products, more competition, and
       | more software engineers employed at more companies?
        
         | rishabhaiover wrote:
         | maybe eventually, not in the near-term future.
        
         | unyttigfjelltol wrote:
         | It's demonetizing process rent-seeking. AI can build whatever
         | process you want, or some approximation of it.
        
         | garbawarb wrote:
         | I kind of imagine more people going off and building their own
         | companies.
        
           | DougN7 wrote:
           | I think so too. But because of code quality issues and LLMs
           | not handling the hard edge cases my guess is most of those
           | startups will be unable to scale in any way. Will be
           | interesting to watch.
        
         | fishpham wrote:
         | I think the argument is that tools like Claude Code will cause
         | more companies to just build solutions in-house rather than
         | purchase from a vendor.
        
           | groceryheist wrote:
           | This is correct. AI is a huge boon for open source, bespoke
           | code, and end-user programming. It's death for business
           | models that depend on proprietary code and products bloated
           | with features only 5% of users use.
        
             | hugs wrote:
             | possibly also a boon for automated testing tools and infra
             | designed for ai-driven coding.
        
       | gip wrote:
       | I'm not really understanding why Thomson Reuters is at direct
       | risk from AI. Providing good data streams will still be very
       | valuable?
        
         | robotswantdata wrote:
         | Huge legal tech business units
        
         | yodon wrote:
         | If customers start asking Claude first, before they ask Thomson
         | Reuters, that's a big risk for the later company.
        
           | gip wrote:
           | Got it, thank you for the insight.
           | 
           | The assumption is that Claude has access to a stream of
           | fresh, currated data. Building that would be a different
           | focus for Anthropic. Plus Thomson Reuters could build an
           | integration. Not totally convinced that is a major threat
           | yet.
        
         | whitej125 wrote:
         | TR will not disappear. But their value to the market was "data
         | + interface to said data" and that value prop is quickly
         | eroding to "just the data".
         | 
         | You can be a huge, profitable data-only company... but it's
         | likely going to be smaller than a data+interface company. And
         | so, shareholder value will follow accordingly.
        
           | palmotea wrote:
           | Seems like they should hold tight to that data (and not
           | license it for short-term profit), so customers have to use
           | their interface to get at it.
        
         | elemeno wrote:
         | They're one of the two big names in legal data - Thomson
         | Reuters Westlaw and RELX LexisNexis. They're not just search
         | engines for law, but also hubs for information about how laws
         | are being applied with articles from their in house lawyers
         | (PSLs, professional support lawyers - most big law firms have
         | them as well to perform much the same function) that summarise
         | current case law so that lawyers don't have to read through all
         | the judgements themselves.
         | 
         | If AI tooling starts to seriously chip away at those
         | foundations then it puts a large chunk of their business at
         | risk.
        
           | themgt wrote:
           | The commodification of _expertise_ writ large is a bit mind
           | boggling to contemplate.
        
       | simianwords wrote:
       | I came across this company called OpenEvidence. They seem to be
       | offering semantic search on medical research. Founded in 2021.
       | 
       | How could it possibly keep up with LLM based search?
        
         | dnw wrote:
         | It is a little more than semantic search. Their value prop is
         | curation of trusted medical sources and network effects--
         | selling directly to doctors.
         | 
         | I believe frontier labs have no option but to go into verticals
         | (because models are getting commoditized and capability
         | overhang is real and hard to overcome at scale), however, they
         | can only go into so many verticals.
        
           | simianwords wrote:
           | > Their value prop is curation of trusted medical sources
           | 
           | Interesting. Why wouldn't an LLM based search provide the
           | same thing? Just ask it to "use only trusted sources".
        
             | tacoooooooo wrote:
             | They're building a moat with data. They're building their
             | own datasets of trusted sources, using their own teams of
             | physicians and researchers. They've got hundreds of
             | thousands of physicians asking millions of questions
             | everyday. None of the labs have this sort of data coming in
             | or this sort of focus on such a valuable niche
        
               | simianwords wrote:
               | > They're building their own datasets of trusted sources,
               | using their own teams of physicians and researchers.
               | 
               | Oh so they are not just helping in search but also in
               | curating data.
               | 
               | > They've got hundreds of thousands of physicians asking
               | millions of questions everyday. None of the labs have
               | this sort of data coming in or this sort of focus on such
               | a valuable niche
               | 
               | I don't take this too seriously because lots of
               | physicians use ChatGPT already.
        
             | palmotea wrote:
             | > Why wouldn't an LLM based search provide the same thing?
             | Just ask it to "use only trusted sources".
             | 
             | Is that sarcasm?
        
               | simianwords wrote:
               | why?
        
               | Rygian wrote:
               | How does the LLM know which sources can be trusted?
        
               | simianwords wrote:
               | yeah it can avoid blogspam as sources and prioritise
               | research from more prestigious journals or more
               | citations. it will be smart enough to use some proxy.
        
         | olliepro wrote:
         | Much of the scientific medical literature is behind paywalls.
         | They have tapped into that datasource (whereas ChatGPT doesn't
         | have access to that data). I suspect that were the medical
         | journals to make a deal with OpenAI to open up the access to
         | their articles/data etc, that open evidence would rely on the
         | existing customers and stickiness of the product, but in that
         | circumstance, they'd be pretty screwed.
         | 
         | For example, only 7% of pharmaceutical research is publicly
         | accessible without paying. See
         | https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7048123/
        
       | roysting wrote:
       | Can this really be a kind of herding stampede behavior over
       | Cowork? It's been out several days now and just all the sudden
       | today, all the traders suddenly got it into their little herd
       | animal heads that everyone should rush to the exists... after
       | that equally sketchy silver and gold rug pull type action last
       | week?
       | 
       | Something seems quite off. Am I the only one?
        
         | retube wrote:
         | Markets are not as efficient as the textbooks would have you
         | believe. Investors typically rely on a fairly small set of
         | analysts for market news and views. It might take those guys a
         | while to think about stuff, write a note etc. The deepseek
         | crash last year lagged by several days as well.
        
           | andai wrote:
           | I'm out of the loop, but I thought there were sophisticated
           | automated trading algorithms where people pay to install
           | microwave antennas so they can have 1ms lower latency. And I
           | thought those systems are hooked up to run sentiment analysis
           | on the news. Maybe the news is late?
        
       | myth_drannon wrote:
       | Paypal fell 20% today.
        
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       (page generated 2026-02-03 23:01 UTC)