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Shares of major Indian IT companies fell sharply on Wednesday, tracking a heavy sell-off in US software stocks overnight. Companies such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Persistent Systems and Coforge saw their stocks drop by as much as 9% during the day.
Together, these five IT stocks wiped out nearly ₹2 lakh crore in market value within the first half of the trading session.
What triggered the sell-off: the trouble began in the US markets, where software and technology stocks came under intense pressure after Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence company, launched a new set of AI-powered tools.
Anthropic introduced multiple new plug-ins for its AI assistant, Claude, that can independently carry out tasks such as document review, compliance checks and drafting legal briefs. These are activities that were earlier handled by software platforms.
Indian IT firms earn a large part of their revenue by providing software services to US and global companies. They help build, manage and maintain systems used by banks, law firms, insurers and large enterprises.
Stocks of global software giants such as Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Workday and DocuSign also came under pressure, as Claude’s new tools can now perform tasks that earlier required these platforms.
Now what: this signals a shift in investor perception. Analysts now see traditional software and IT services as vulnerable to rapid AI-driven disruption.
The mood on Wall Street has turned sharply bearish, with one brokerage even calling the situation a “SaaSpocalypse” - a term used to describe widespread panic selling in software-as-a-service stocks.
