Overview
- RELX sank as much as 17% and Wolters Kluwer fell up to 13%, with RELX set for its biggest one‑day drop since 1988 and now down roughly 45% from last year’s peak.
- Selling spread to North America, where Thomson Reuters slid nearly 20% and major software names such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Adobe dropped more than 5% as the Nasdaq fell about 2.2%.
- Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork legal plugin automates contract review, NDA triage and compliance checks, is released as open‑source “starter” plugins with MCP integrations to apps like Slack and Microsoft 365, and the company stresses outputs require review by licensed attorneys.
- Advertising groups also retreated, with Publicis down about 9% and Omnicom nearly 6%, as a Barclays survey flagged WPP, Omnicom and Publicis as most exposed, and Publicis earmarked roughly €900 million in 2026 for AI‑focused acquisitions.
- The rout followed weeks of mounting scrutiny of software valuations, including SAP’s cloud‑revenue forecast miss that erased about $40 billion, as analysts warned incumbents must show clear, revenue‑generating AI roadmaps.