
AI threatens a Wall Street cash cow: Financial and legal data
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For years it seemed like a sure-fire business model: Amass vast troves of financial data and sell it to Wall Street for a premium. Then Claude came along.
Shares of companies such as S&P Global, MSCI, Intercontinental Exchange, London Stock Exchange Group and FactSet Research Systems all tumbled this week after fast-growing artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic unveiled a new suite of tools for automating legal tasks. The new legal plug-in for Anthropic’s Cowork assistant, powered by its AI model Claude, didn’t seem to have much to with financial data. Nonetheless, LSEG—which has spent years pivoting away from its traditional stock-exchange business to selling data and analytics—slid 13% on Tuesday, and its shares dropped further Wednesday morning.
S&P Global and FactSet were also hit with double-digit losses on Tuesday, while ICE and MSCI both fell more than 5%. The losses highlighted the expanding threat of AI-driven disruption for financial services and the white-collar professionals who work in the sector. In recent months, the sophistication of a new Claude-based tool for writing code rattled software engineers and raised concern about its impact on the broader tech industry.
Anthropic’s rollout of new legal tools added to similar fears for lawyers and hit the stock of companies that run legal-research databases, such as Thomson Reuters. The selloff rippled out into a swath of other companies, as investors assessed which businesses are next in line for disruption by AI. “The market has cast a very broad net as to which companies can be exposed to AI risk," said UBS analyst Michael Werner.
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