Shares of several leading cybersecurity firms, including CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and SentinelOne, dipped on Monday (23 Feb) after Anthropic’s latest security plugin for Claude spooked investors.

The Claude Code Security feature, built into Claude Code on the web, has been designed to scan codebases for vulnerabilities and suggest patches for human review, upping the game on existing analysis tools that are struggling to match AI-powered attackers.

Despite being limited to a research preview, the tool sent shockwaves through the market, with shares of CrowdStrike, Datadog and Zscaler all falling by around 11%, while Fortinet and Okta slipped by 6%, and Palo Alto Networks dropped 5%, according to Reuters.

Although Anthropic’s tool lacks real‑time security functions, like identifying live intrusions or stopping active attacks, the firm claims it reasons about code the same way a human security researcher would by tracking data flow and spotting complex vulnerabilities, just much faster.

The AI firm claims that in less than a month, Claude’s security feature has found over 500 vulnerabilities in production open-source codebases, bugs it said had “gone undetected for decades”.

Firing back, the CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, posted to LinkedIn that Claude’s new plugin would not put cybersecurity firms like his out of business, writing that they “address different problems” and “sit at completely different points in the security lifecycle”.

Meanwhile, Shrenik Kothari, a security and infrastructure analyst at Robert W. Baird, told Reuters that the market downturn was a “continuation of a panic‑driven, narrative‑led selloff” seen earlier this month, when legal and software firms were hit hard following the release of similar Claude plugins.

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The AI firm’s disruption of the market shows no signs of slowing, either. 

Shares of tech behemoth IBM also plummeted yesterday, falling more than 13% after Anthropic claimed its LLM could quickly modernise the legacy COBOL programming language, the foundation of IBM mainframes across critical sectors like banking, insurance, and government.  

“Modernising a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows. This resulted in large timelines and high costs that few were willing to take on,” said Anthropic.

“AI changes this. Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernisation. With AI, teams can modernise their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years.”

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