Amid panic in the tech world over artificial intelligence firm Anthropic bringing new legal tools to its flagship chatbot Claude, Tech Mahindra CEO and Managing Director Mohit Joshi has dismissed the market response as a "clear overreaction".
This comes as shares of various IT giants tanked on Wednesday—Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) saw the biggest decline of 7 per cent, followed by HCLTech and Tech Mahindra at 4.5 per cent, Wipro at 3.7 per cent, and Infosys at 2.4 per cent. As a result, the Nifty IT index for India closed the day with a dip of 5.8 per cent.
Abroad, shares of Oracle dropped by 4.2 per cent soon after trading opened on Wednesday, with other Adobe (2.6 per cent), Salesforce (3.3 per cent), Thomson Reuters (2.4 per cent) and Atlassian (3 per cent) also affected.
"So earlier, the impact was only on the IT services or the consulting companies that had seen drops in valuation. Over the past couple of weeks, that contagion appears to have spread to the SaaS (Software as a Service) companies as well," Joshi told Business Today.
He added that in a nutshell, Claude's new tools were basically part of a technology shift, claiming that every such shift in history had proven to be a "tailwind" for both the IT and SaaS sectors.
The tech tumult that has erased more than $250 billion from global software stocks comes after Claude's Cowork AI agent rolled out new AI plugins capable of taking on tasks like customer service, product management, marketing, legal and data analysis, among others.
Anthropic has also said the tools could generate financial statements, analyse sales prospects, generate customer support responses, assess non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and review contracts, legal briefings, and financial models.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has also weighed in, dismissing the market panic over the Claude tools, and saying that the idea of AI making tech companies obsolete was the "most illogical thing in the world".
"If you were a human or robot, artificial, general robotics, would you use tools or reinvent tools? The answer, obviously, is to use tools ... That's why the latest breakthroughs in AI are about tool use, because the tools are designed to be explicit," said the chief of the world's most valuable company, as per a Reuters report.
