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Software companies get a glimmer of hope that they can be Anthropic customers, rather than being eaten

Anthropic’s latest announcement seems to be giving a lift to software companies the market was previously viewing as the walking disrupted.

Matt Phillips

Beleaguered business software stocks like IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Oracle got a somewhat surprising lift from a flurry of headlines out of Anthropic early Tuesday, after the AI lab announced a series of new plug-ins allowing integrations with companies in a range of industries.

Reuters reports that “Anthropic said its new plug-ins were developed with partners, including LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce’s Slack, and DocuSign.”

Shares of such stocks bounced on the news. They’ve been battered for weeks, with each of the aforementioned companies losing anywhere from 19% to 29% of their value over the past month even after today’s bounce, as investors stared into a future of fruitless struggle for these companies before succumbing to AI mastery and ultimate disruption.

The growing sense of dread surrounding software stocks, underscored by this week’s slump based on nothing more than an analyst’s fictionalized riff on the dystopian future for the sector, suggests that Wall Street is more than willing to buy into the storyline of ruthless technological conquest pushed by Silicon Valley’s AI boosters. Earlier this month, a white paper by a former karaoke company turned trucking AI provider helped demolish billions of dollars of trucking market cap.

But Anthropic’s latest announcements can be read as something of an alternate pathway, suggesting that at least one AI lab’s goal is not to disrupt and destroy other business software giants, but rather to turn them into paying customers.

That would likely be an appealing option for the companies, as their own share prices would benefit from the sprinkling of AI pixie dust that an accommodation with, rather than a death struggle against, AI might bring.

Sure, there would be strategic risks of getting into bed with Anthropic, but after the ride these stocks have had over the last few weeks, those may be risks worth taking.

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Sandisk slides on Citron short announcement

Sandisk’s roughly 1,200% run-up over the last year — it was spun off from Western Digital exactly a year ago — took a breather early Tuesday, after well-known stuff-stirrer Citron Research, short seller Andrew Left’s firm, announced it was short the stock.

In a post on X, Citron suggested that while Sandisk has benefited from the parabolic price increase for memory chips, it’s only a matter of time before giant contract chip manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and TSMC turn on the taps:

“The market is pricing SanDisk like it’s $NVDA. There’s one problem: NVIDIA has a moat. SanDisk sells a commodity. We’ve seen this movie before 2008, 2012, 2018. It’s never different this time. Memory is a cycle, and cycles peak.”

That’s true historically speaking, but Wall Street seems to see the memory price spike continuing for at least a couple more years. Analysts have ratcheted up their earnings expectations over the next few years, in line with the guidance Sandisk issued in its latest earnings report. And shorting a stock with this much momentum — it’s up more than 150% this year alone! — is treacherous indeed.

Citron Research on X: "Citron is Short $SNDK — They Don't Ring a Bell at the Top We don't need Anthropic to announce they're making NAND. Samsung is already the 800-pound gorilla...

“The market is pricing SanDisk like it’s $NVDA. There’s one problem: NVIDIA has a moat. SanDisk sells a commodity. We’ve seen this movie before 2008, 2012, 2018. It’s never different this time. Memory is a cycle, and cycles peak.”

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Novo Nordisk to slash GLP-1 list prices starting in 2027

Novo said the move will expand access for patients, “specifically those whose out-of-pocket costs are linked to list price, such as individuals with high-deductible health plans or co-insurance benefit designs.”

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Top AI energy trade Constellation Energy beats earnings expectations

The company declined to give full-year 2026 guidance until a call slated for the end of March.

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Cipher Mining pares early losses after Q4 results disappoint

Cipher Mining cut its premarket losses on Tuesday after missing revenue and earnings estimates for the last quarter of 2025. The stock had fallen as much as 4.7% ahead of the open before paring its losses in morning trading.

For Q4, the company reported:

Revenue of $60 million (estimate: $84.4 million).
Adjusted earnings per share of -$0.14 (estimate: -$0.06).

After the close on Monday, crypto miner Canaan announced that it had purchased Cipher Mining’s stake in a mining joint venture for $39.75 million, deepening Cipher’s pivot away from bitcoin mining toward data centers. Indeed, CIFR acknowledged in the Q4 and year-end report that its “identity has evolved to focus on enabling next-generation compute at industrial scale.”

The Canaan acquisition news came on the heels of former bitcoin miner Bitdeer announcing that it had sold all of its bitcoin holdings to fund its pivot to AI.