Anthropic unveiled a spreadsheet tool Tuesday, sending shares of Microsoft, the maker of Excel, lower. Investors now know better than to panic.
Claude Sheets allows Anthropic customers to build full spreadsheets from simple prompts and organize data collaboratively with colleagues. A beta version of the tool is now available for paid Claude subscribers.
Anthropic on Tuesday also rolled out a collaborative product-management tool called Claude Whiteboards, and renamed its data-visualization package to Claude Data from Dashboards.
At first glance, Sheets is a direct competitor with Excel, the Microsoft 365 software that has become synonymous with spreadsheets in the digital age. Microsoft shares, which started the morning about flat, finished the day down 2.2%.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Investors have seen this movie before. Software stocks tumbled in the spring in response to Anthropic's buzzy artificial-intelligence tools, including its coding agent Claude Code, which people can use to build new applications from scratch.
The consensus on Wall Street is that the selloff was overblown: The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector exchange-traded fund is up 34% since hitting a 52-week closing low on April 10, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
A company as large and embedded in other businesses' operations as Microsoft is unlikely to be the biggest victim of AI disruption. Microsoft 365 revenue jumped 17% year over year in the most recent quarter to $27.8 billion, with 365 commercial seats growing 5%.
Microsoft is integrating its own Copilot AI tool into its software offerings. It also has a partnership with Anthropic that makes Claude's AI models available within Excel itself.
Not to mention, Microsoft is one of the anchor investors in Anthropic's pending initial public offering, and the AI lab is set to pay Microsoft up to $49.2 billion for compute capacity through 2033. Microsoft succeeds if Anthropic succeeds.
Microsoft was a Barron's stock pick in March.
That isn't to say Microsoft is totally immune from the pressures of AI. Anthropic, which is set to go public this month at a target valuation of $1.4 trillion, has made selling its Claude models to companies the core of its business strategy. Some businesses may eventually opt to replace older solutions with Anthropic's in-house tools.
Given the software carnage in the spring, however, Microsoft's modest move on Tuesday indicates investors want to see hard proof of customers moving from Excel to Claude Sheets before selling wildly.
