Anthropic is releasing a new version of its most powerful AI model that’s designed to carry out financial research, days after the company’s push into legal services upended the stocks of legacy software makers.

The company on Thursday unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, which it says can scrutinize company data, regulatory filings and market information to come up with detailed financial analyses that would normally take a person days to complete. Opus 4.6 is also meant to be better at a range of other work-related functions, including making spreadsheets and presentations, as well as software development.

Shares of financial services companies slumped following the release, with FactSet Research Systems Inc. falling as much as 10%, while S&P Global Inc., Moody’s Corp and Nasdaq, Inc. all turned sharply lower.

Anthropic and rival OpenAI have spent much of the past year developing artificial intelligence tools to streamline a wider range of professional tasks – from financial services to health care – with the goal of courting more business customers and justifying their lofty valuations. Anthropic is currently in talks to raise a new round of funding at a $350 billion valuation and OpenAI is in fundraising discussions at a valuation of up to $830 billion.

OpenAI also introduced an update on Thursday to its AI coding agent, Codex, that’s meant to further streamline the process of writing and debugging code, and can be used to build software like complicated games and apps. The ChatGPT maker stressed that the product’s capabilities extend beyond writing software to a range of other related documentation and presentation work, such as helping to create slide decks and analyze user data.

Anthropic, for its part, has more than 300,000 business customers who use its models to streamline workplace responsibilities, particularly in the field of computer programming where it has emerged as a market leader with Claude Code.

The Claude maker’s expansion beyond coding has recently rattled Wall Street. Anthropic’s quiet release of a tool to automate certain legal work helped spark a trillion-dollar market meltdown this week, particularly among software stocks that investors fear may eventually be rendered obsolete. The product has become a proxy for concerns about which companies and services will eventually be disrupted by AI.

The legal feature is a plug-in for Claude Cowork, an AI agent released as a “research preview” earlier this year. Cowork quickly made waves among technology enthusiasts for being a more intuitive tool for building apps, creating spreadsheets and sorting through troves of data. Anthropic said Cowork was built in a matter of days, with most of the code written by Claude’s own AI.

Scott White, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude AI models, said the company plans to focus on improving the capability to carry out work related to areas like cybersecurity, life sciences, health care and financial services.

“Those are areas where we’re going to lean in really hard,” he said.

– By Racheal Metz (Bloomberg News)