Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Investors and stock traders continue to question whether software companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, and others can withstand the competition and the threat posed by AI-powered rivals.

Selloff has intensified with each new announcement from AI companies. In the first two months of 2026, the State Street SPDR S&P Software & Services ETF, which tracks an equal-weight benchmark of about 140 software companies, has dropped 20% and almost 30% since its high from this past fall.

Despite these classical software companies‘ pricey subscriptions, minimal capital expenditures, and strong profit margins, investors wonder how long the pain can last.

Companies in the State Street software ETF have lost a combined $1.6 trillion in market capitalization this year.

These corporations are trading at roughly 19 times their next 12 months of earnings, down from a peak of more than 47 times in 2022. Companies in the broad S&P 500, meanwhile, are trading at close to 22 times forward earnings.

• Microsoft, AppLovin, Intuit, Salesforce, and ServiceNow have each lost at least $50 billion in market capitalization.

• Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, is the S&P 500’s worst performer year to date, dropping some 42%.

• The human-resources software platform Workday posted a 38% decline.

• Atlassian, the maker of Jira and Trello, is now trading near 22 times forward earnings.

The slump extends beyond stocks. Software accounts for around 13% of speculative-grade corporate loans that were broadly syndicated by banks to investors. Some of the biggest private lenders are getting caught in the carnage.

IBL News | New York

Anthropic introduced last month Claude Code Security, a new capability now in a limited research preview that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches that traditional tools, which usually look for known patterns, often miss.

Security teams face the challenge of addressing too many subtle, context-dependent vulnerabilities exploited by attackers, which require skilled human researchers to deal with ever-expanding backlogs.

“AI is beginning to change that calculus. We’ve recently shown that Claude can detect novel, high-severity vulnerabilities. But the same capabilities that help defenders find and fix vulnerabilities could help attackers exploit them,” said the company in a blog post.

Rather than scanning for known patterns, Claude Code Security reads and reasons about the code the way a human security researcher would: understanding how components interact, tracing how data moves through the application, and catching complex vulnerabilities that rule-based tools miss.

Claude Code Security is being released as a limited research preview to Enterprise and Team customers, with expedited access for maintainers of open-source repositories.

Using Claude Opus 4.6, released earlier this month, Anthropic found over 500 vulnerabilities in production open-source codebases—bugs that had gone undetected for decades, despite years of expert review.

“We also use Claude to review our own code, and we’ve found it to be extremely effective at securing Anthropic’s systems. We built Claude Code Security to make those same defensive capabilities more widely available. And since it’s built on Claude Code, teams can review findings and iterate on fixes within the tools they already use.”

The company expects that a significant share of the world’s code will be scanned by AI in the near future, given how effective models have become at finding long-hidden bugs and security issues.

“Attackers will use AI to find exploitable weaknesses faster than ever. But defenders who move quickly can find those same weaknesses, patch them, and reduce the risk of an attack. “