Anthropic's Claude Triggers AI Industry Turbulence. Where Are the Risks and Opportunities?

Recently, Anthropic's Claude has undergone several updates, causing market turbulence. These actions include:

1. On February 5th, Claude upgraded its flagship model, launching opus 4.6 and introducing a higher-priced fast mode. The core of fast mode is to increase response speed to 2.5 times that of the standard mode through inference priority configuration, while maintaining the model's capabilities and output quality. This comes at a cost of approximately 6 times the usage expense, primarily targeting time-sensitive enterprise and developer scenarios.

2. On January 12th, Claude introduced cowork, turning AI into a colleague capable of completing tasks. Users can authorize Claude to perform multi-step tasks in designated folders. Claude also open-sourced several work plugins, including those for legal and financial fields.

3. Since 2025, the MCP ecosystem has continued to expand: Claude can now directly interact with tools like Slack (owned by $Salesforce.com(CRM)$  , $Asana, Inc.(ASAN)$   , $Figma(FIG)$   , and Canva without switching tabs. For example, if a product manager wants to create marketing materials using Figma, Claude can directly modify the Figma files, unlike Gemini which generates an image but cannot modify it.

What's the impact?

SaaS stocks' moats are being eroded, leading to a general decline, but the market's across-the-board reaction may not be 100% reasonable. Claude's series of actions mark the AI industry's shift from large model competition to practical application, raising market concerns about reduced demand for traditional software companies. However, Claude may actually benefit software companies integrated into its workflow, as they'll likely see increased usage frequency, expanded user base, and higher ARPU.

Claude may negatively impact companies that are not integrated into it, including:

1. Niche SaaS with mismatched strategic priorities, such as those with small user bases, outdated tech stacks, or irrelevance to Claude's core office collaboration scenarios.

2. Wrapper SaaS, like third-party tools offering low-cost or free services by encapsulating Claude's API.

3. Productivity SaaS with high functional overlap. Claude won't integrate all similar software.

4. Highly sensitive government and defense SaaS. Claude's emphasis on AI safety and compliance may temporarily shield these from erosion.

Claude brought more than just negative effects. In terms of the entire AI industry chain, Claude's updates will significantly increase compute demand, benefiting cloud service providers partnered with Anthropic. The increased compute demand will also benefit chip stocks and infrastructure companies related to data center construction.

1. In the cloud computing sector, $Amazon (AMZN.US)$ 's AWS is the core partner, described by Anthropic as their "primary cloud and training partner". Anthropic has also officially disclosed expanded use of $Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$ Cloud's TPU and services. $Microsoft (MSFT.US)$ Azure has also partnered with Claude. On November 18, 2025, Microsoft announced that Anthropic would expand Claude on Microsoft Azure and committed to purchasing 30 billion dollars worth of Azure compute resources. The high-price strategy of Fast mode increases Anthropic's average customer value, potentially growing both API revenue share and compute rental income for cloud vendors.

2. Opus 4.6's high-concurrency inference and Fast mode also increase demand for chips; MCP ecosystem expansion drives AI server and GPU purchases. Beneficiaries in the chip sector are suppliers to various cloud service providers, including $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ , $Broadcom (AVGO.US)$ (partnered with Google), and $Marvell Technology (MRVL.US)$ (partnered with Amazon).

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