Information security and software stocks fell on Friday as traders fretted over Anthropic’s advanced AI model, in the latest slide sparked by worries new tools will upend a wide range of sectors.
Concerns have mounted all week across the software industry after Anthropic announced that its latest AI model, Mythos, was able to detect critical vulnerabilities in code that extensive testing had previously missed. It was further evidence that AI models can often code better — and more quickly and at cheaper rates — than humans, a phenomenon which has ignited several bouts of selling this year.
The S&P 500 software and services index fell 1.6 per cent on Friday, bringing its fall for this year to 26 per cent. A widely tracked Goldman Sachs basket of US software stocks dropped 5 per cent on Friday, also extending a sharp decline in recent months.