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Depending on your point of view (glass half full, glass half empty), AI either promises a golden age of limitless productivity or a desolate future of professional obsolescence.
This week, as Anthropic unleashed the latest “plugins” for its Claude chatbot, the stock market – and even many Anthropic employees – appeared to cast their vote for the latter.
In what traders are already calling the “SaaS apocalypse,” the release of these semi-autonomous agents triggered a seismic shift in global finance, wiping nearly $300 billion off software stocks in a single day and fuelling fears that AI’s apocalyptic jobs prophecy is moving from theory to reality.
Anthropic, the $350 billion Silicon Valley titan, launched the plugins with uncharacteristic subtlety. Billed as specialist assistants for legal, marketing, finance, and data analysis, the tools claim to represent the evolution of AI from a conversational engine into a “digital co-worker.”
Importantly, unlike previous bots that required human prompting at every turn, these “agentic” AIs are designed to carry out complex business tasks autonomously, operating across a company’s entire digital infrastructure without needing any of that arcade coding nonsense.
Massive software sell-off
However, the reaction from Wall Street and the City of London was swift. Investors, fearing that these agents will render traditional software platforms redundant, staged a massive sell-off. Legacy giants that provide mundane but essential tools for accounting and data entry, such as SAP, Sage, and Relx, saw their valuations crater.
Advertising powerhouse WPP fell 15%, while the property portal Rightmove dropped 10% on fears that AI could soon automate the entire house-hunting process. Specialist investors, including the Finsbury Growth and Income Trust, have been caught in the crosshairs, as the “boring-but-reliable” software stocks that anchor many pension funds were unceremoniously dumped into the “AI loser” bucket.
While billionaires like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang have dismissed the sell-off as “illogical,” the anxiety on the ground is palpable, even within Anthropic itself.
In response to an internal survey in December, reports The Telegraph, one Anthropic employee frets: “In the long term, I think AI will end up doing everything and make me and many others irrelevant.” Another says: “It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job.”
Indeed, this sentiment is echoed by Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, who has warned that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar roles in the coming years.
White-collar wipe-out
The long-term effect on the labour market is already becoming visible. In the UK, administrative vacancies have fallen by 36,000 over the last six months and entry-level job postings have plummeted by 35% since the launch of ChatGPT. A JP Morgan study suggests a grimmer reality: AI is currently destroying more jobs in Britain than it is creating, resulting in a net loss of 8%.
For the “Gen Z” workforce, the threat is twofold. Not only are entry-level roles being squeezed, but there is a growing fear of “deskilling.” As junior associates in law and finance find themselves relying on bots that can perform due diligence in a tenth of the time of a human, they risk becoming obsolete before they have even mastered their craft. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall recently levelled with the public, admitting that “some jobs will go.” That’s almost certainly an understatement.
As Anthropic’s agents begin to fill the desks of traditional white-collar workers, the era of AI as a mere novelty is over. The stock market has signalled that the displacement of human labour is no longer a distant warning: it is a priced-in reality.
Indeed, it seems that for the modern office worker, the arrival of the AI colleague may well mean the departure of the human one. What a depressing thought as I sit here in my home office on a dreary Friday morning contemplating my journalistic future!
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