Feb 24 (Reuters) - Shares of U.S. software companies that entered into partnerships with AI startup Anthropic on Tuesday helped lead a rebound in the sector that has been hammered by fears about the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence.
Anthropic said it was developing new tools, the so-called "plug-ins", with its partners that could help with investment banking, wealth management and HR tasks, including deal reviews, portfolio analysis and making new-hire materials reflect a brand's tone and policies.
Shares of its partners, including LSEG (LSEG.L), FactSet (FDS.N), Salesforce's Slack, and DocuSign (DOCU.O), climbed between 0.4% and 5.3%.
The S&P 500 software & services index (.SPLRCIS), also rose 1.4% and the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV.Z), jumped 2.4%.
The software index touched a 10-month low on Monday after Citrini Research laid out a 2028 scenario where unemployment rises to 10.2%, triggered by layoffs as AI rapidly turfs out software and delivery applications.
"Software stocks and the IGV particularly are just massively oversold. So any incremental news that we're getting about more disruptions is like getting to a point where how much is priced in already," said Dennis Dick, chief market strategist at Stock Trader Network.
"Some of this disruption is not imminent and a lot of this is probably years out yet. The market's telling us that now."
A week-long selloff earlier this month wiped out about $1 trillion in market value on Wall Street that analysts dubbed 'Software-mageddon' and hurt sectors spanning from software to logistics companies on both sides of the Atlantic and India.
Anthropic said on Monday its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize a programming language run on IBM systems, resulting in the biggest daily drop in shares of the legacy company (IBM.N), in more than 25 years. IBM shares were up 3.5% on Tuesday.
Tax-preparation software Intuit (INTU.O), gained 2.8% and AI-solutions provider Intapp (INTA.O), climbed 7.1% after the companies announced separate partnerships with Anthropic on Tuesday.
Reporting by Johann M Cherian, Sruthi Shankar and Purvi Agarwal in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli
