$285B SaaSpocalypse: What It Means for UK Professionals

$285 billion wiped off software stocks in four days. Here's what actually happened.

On 30 January, Anthropic — the company behind Claude — posted a blog and a GitHub repo. No press conference. No keynote. Just 11 plugins for their AI tool, Claude Cowork.

Four days later, $285 billion in software market value had evaporated. Traders at Jefferies started calling it the "SaaSpocalypse."

If you work in legal or financial services in the UK, this one hit close to home.

What Happened

The plugins cover legal contract review, sales CRM workflows, financial modelling, compliance checks, and more. They're open source — anyone can read the code, modify it, or deploy it.

What spooked the market wasn't the plugins themselves. It was what they represented.

Anthropic did something AI companies usually avoid: it moved up the stack. Instead of selling API access and letting software companies build on top, it shipped the workflows directly. Contract review. NDA triage. Compliance summaries. Financial analysis. All inside one tool, for one subscription.

The market's conclusion was instant: why pay for ten software licences when one AI agent handles the workflow?

Who Got Hit

The damage was global, but the UK took a particular beating.

RELX — the parent company of LexisNexis — dropped 14%. Its shares have nearly halved from their peak last February. Twelve months ago, RELX was celebrated as an "AI beneficiary." Now it's a cautionary tale.

Thomson Reuters fell 16%. Its biggest single-day decline in company history.

The London Stock Exchange Group, which runs a large data analytics business, lost 13%. Pearson, Sage, Experian — all took hits ranging from 4 to 10%.

Across the Atlantic, LegalZoom dropped 20%. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Adobe each fell around 7%. In India, IT services giants like Infosys and TCS lost hundreds of billions in rupees of market value in a single day.

Then Anthropic made things worse. Days after the initial selloff, they released Claude Opus 4.6 — a model capable of coordinating whole teams of AI agents. On the same day, CNBC reporters built a working clone of Monday.com with Claude Code. It took under an hour and cost about $10 in compute.

Why This One Felt Different

I've watched "AI is going to kill X" headlines come and go for two years. Most of them were noise. Remember when ChatGPT was going to kill Google? Google's search revenue is higher now than it was then.

This one is different.

Previous AI tools sat alongside existing software. They made it faster. ChatGPT helped you draft a contract — but you still needed your contract management system to store it, track changes, and manage approvals.

The Claude Cowork plugins don't assist your software. They replace the workflow the software was built for.

The legal plugin reviews contracts, flags non-standard clauses against a negotiation playbook, and generates compliance summaries. The sales plugin connects to your CRM, researches prospects, and drafts outreach. The finance plugin builds models and tracks metrics.

And the economics are brutal for incumbents. A Claude Max subscription costs $100 a month. That single subscription now covers work that previously required separate tools costing $500+ for legal review, $150+ for CRM add-ons, $200+ for data analysis, and $50+ per seat for project management.

One tool. One subscription. That's the bit that got investors' attention.

The UK Legal and Financial Services Angle

Here's what the SaaSpocalypse means if you work in UK legal or financial services.

What's real: The legal plugin can do basic contract triage, NDA review, and compliance flagging. For routine document review — the kind that takes up 60% of a junior associate's billable hours — it's genuinely competent. Law.com reported that it poses a real threat to broad-scope legal tech companies like Harvey and Legora.

What's also real: It can't sign an MSA. It can't own risk. It can't navigate the politics of a boardroom or manage client relationships. One CEO quoted in the coverage put it well: "AI can kill junior grunt work like analysis, reports, slideware. But it cannot take up accountability, integration, risk ownership, change management."

For financial services, the threat is similar. Opus 4.6 specifically excels at financial screening, due diligence data gathering, and market-intelligence synthesis. That's a direct overlap with what firms pay Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg terminals for — and what analysts spend hours doing manually.

But the people I train aren't usually worried about losing their job to AI tomorrow. They're worried about falling behind the colleague who figured out how to use it six months ago.

Is the Panic Overblown?

Some of it, yes. The stock market overreacted.

JPMorgan analyst Toby Ogg described it well: "We are now in an environment where the sector isn't just guilty until proven innocent but is now being sentenced before trial."

No company has attributed a revenue decline directly to Claude Cowork. Not one. Enterprise software contracts are long-term. Procurement cycles move slowly. The selloff unfolded in hours. The actual disruption will take years.

Wedbush Securities called it an "Armageddon scenario for the sector that is far from reality" — pointing out that enterprises won't overhaul billions in existing infrastructure overnight.

And there's a practical gap the market is ignoring. Deploying these plugins in a law firm or bank requires technical skills, data security assurances, and integration work that most organisations haven't even started thinking about.

But here's the thing. The direction of travel is clear. The question isn't whether AI agents will handle chunks of legal and financial workflows. It's when, and how fast your organisation adapts.

As one analyst put it: "The SaaSpocalypse is real — but it's a 3-year trend, not a 3-day event."

What I'd Actually Do

If I were sitting in a legal or financial services firm right now, I wouldn't be panicking. But I wouldn't be ignoring this either.

Three things I'd do this month:

Try the tools yourself. Don't rely on vendor demos or analyst reports. Get a Claude subscription, install a plugin, and run it against a real (non-confidential) document. Form your own opinion. Most people I work with are surprised by how capable these tools already are — and equally surprised by the gaps.

Audit your software stack. Look at every SaaS tool your team pays for. Ask: "Could an AI agent do 80% of what this tool does?" For some, the answer will be no — your core systems of record aren't going anywhere. For others, especially analytics dashboards, research tools, and reporting platforms, the answer might surprise you.

Invest in your people, not just your tools. The firms that come out ahead won't be the ones that replace the most staff. They'll be the ones whose staff know how to use AI as a force multiplier. That's the gap I see every week — smart professionals who know AI exists but haven't had the chance to properly learn what it can do for their specific work.

That's why I've just launched a dedicated Claude Cowork training session. 90 minutes. We install Cowork, point it at a real folder on your machine, and build 2-3 workflows that match your actual work — contract triage, financial research, content pipelines, whatever's relevant. By the end, you're not reading about these plugins. You're running them.

The Bigger Picture

This isn't about Anthropic. Another company would have done it if they hadn't. The SaaSpocalypse is the moment investors realised that AI agents with the right instructions can now do work that entire software categories were built around.

That shift won't happen overnight. But over the next two to three years, it will reshape how legal and financial services firms buy, use, and staff around software.

The people who understand these tools — honestly, including where they fall short — will be the ones advising on those decisions. Not the ones catching up.

If you want to understand how changes like this affect your work, I run AI training sessions that cover the full landscape — and a dedicated Cowork session if you want to get hands-on with the tool behind the headlines. Not sure which one fits? Message me. I'll tell you honestly.