At $183 billion AI firm Anthropic, the stakes have always been high. Now with the stock market in a nosedive, however, some of the company’s employees are realizing they may have had a hand in tipping the first in a long series of dominoes.
Last week, Anthropic — one of the leading AI companies on the market — released a new tool called “plugins.” It was described as an assistant that can support people working in legal, marketing, finance, data analysis, or customer service roles.
When it hit the market, law firms and other entities with legal exposure immediately went into shock, taking the “Legal” plugin as an existential threat, despite Anthropic’s insistence that “all outputs should be reviewed by licensed attorneys.” Investors immediately felt the pressure from increasing competition, and soon the broader stock market was in a massive sell off.
While AI agents — semi-autonomous AI systems like Anthropic’s Legal plugin — have yet to prove themselves in the real world, plenty of the company’s staffers are worried they’ve already crossed the Rubicon.
“It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job,” one staffer told The Telegraph.
Another lamented that “in the long term, I think AI will end up doing everything and make me and many others irrelevant.”
An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment to the Telegraph on the sell-off.
While it remains to be seen what real-world effects the company’s tools will have on the actual economy, Anthropic’s push into AI agents represents a strategic embrace of a type of AI that was once relegated to startup engineers and vibe coders of Silicon Valley. It’s a hell of an entrance into the mainstream spotlight, and one which is already having a major impact on the markets.
