Shares of Indian IT companies are on track for their worst trading session in nearly six years, after Anthropic’s new AI plugin tools threatened to upend the business model of the $283-billion outsourcing industry.
On Wednesday (4 February 2026), Nifty IT index fell as much as 6.90%, dragging down the benchmark NSE Nifty 50 with itself. That’s the steepest decline since at least March 2020, wiping out nearly ₹2 lakh crore in market capitalisation of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. to Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. TCS and Wipro fell as much as 5.8% and 3.9%, respectively, while Infosys was down 7.3%.
Essentially, the Nifty IT index was tracking Wall Street where the tech-heavy NASDAQ fell 1.4% on Tuesday, shedding $300 billion in market cap.
Anthropic Claude Cowork
Anthropic has launched plugins for its Claude Cowork agent to automate tasks that IT firms do for their clients by deploying an army of software engineers.
Unlike standard chatbots, Cowork is a specialised platform capable of autonomously executing multi-step business workflows. Its 11 new plugins—covering legal, finance, sales, and data analysis—can review contracts, manage compliance, and build financial models for a fraction of traditional costs.
Investors fear this will dismantle the Indian IT industry’s labour-intensive billing model, as AI agents replace the thousands of human employees currently handling these routine professional services.
“As Indian enterprises integrate Anthropic Claude for critical coding workflows, dependency on large vendor teams may decline, squeezing billable hours and margins,” said Systematix Group analyst Ambrish Shah.
Jefferies saw it coming, sort of.
AI vs IT
In a 2 February report, the US-based investment bank said that it has revised its India portfolio to reduce exposure to IT stocks — in terms of weightage, it now stands at 5.6 versus the MSCI’s 9.7. Moreover, IT stocks are among the worst affected by the flight of foreign capital from Dalal Street.
To be sure, Anthropic did seek to temper concerns, saying that Claude Cowork’s legal plugin doesn’t provide legal advice. “AI-generated analysis should be reviewed by licensed attorneys before being relief upon for legal decisions.”
There isn’t such a proviso yet about its AI plugin for finance tasks, which bring in about a third of Indian IT industry’s revenue.
