#anthropic

#anthropic

From coding tools and chatbots to smart assistants and wearables, the commercials suggest the industry is moving past the hype and skepticism and is betting on mainstream AI adoption. With 30-second spots averaging about $8 million, companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, and Meta used the broadcast to explain what their technology does and why it matters to consumers and businesses alike.

Over the years, the types of companies advertising during the most-watched sporting event have shifted. There aren't many car companies advertising this year, for example. There remain plenty of food and beverage commercials, as evident by spots for Pringles, Nerds, and beer. In recent years, tech companies have begun to use the airtime during the Super Bowl to get their products and messages in front of a large audience.

This week: Anthropic released an update that seems to have tipped the scales against Software as a Service companies, erasing billions in market value. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck, unpack why there was such a massive market response to such a small AI plugin, and what it says about the future of tech investment. Then, Disney has finally named a new CEO in Josh D'Amaro.

ChatGPT owner OpenAI has a workforce double the size of Anthropic, while Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have 228,000 and 183,000 staff respectively, and boast enormous capital positions and distribution networks. Yet Anthropic's AI tools for generating computer code and operating computers go beyond anything these larger companies have managed to launch. OpenAI and Microsoft have struggled to ship products with as much impact recently.

Anthropic announced this week that it will offer a standalone legal GenAI tool that could do such things as document review, flag risk, and even compliance work. The announcement sent legal tech vendors - and, more importantly, their investment - into frenzy. This immediately triggered a significant drop in stock prices of some big legal tech providers like Thomson Reuters, RELX, and Wolters Kluwer.

For one, there's the sheer speed and breadth of it. In the span of two days, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the value of stocks, bonds and loans of companies big and small across Silicon Valley. Software stocks were at the epicenter, plunging so much that the value of those tracked in an iShares ETF has now dropped almost $1 trillion over the past seven days.

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The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said that Anthropic will help the government to build and pilot an assistant that will help support people in specific situations, starting with "providing custom career advice and help to lock down a job". The pilot is planned to start later this year. Earlier in the week Anthropic's chief executive Dario Amodei published a magnum opus detailing among other things how he expects AI to disrupt to the job market.

The promenade in this ski town turns into a tech trade show floor at WEF time, with the logos of prominent software companies and consulting firms plastered to shopfronts and signage touting various AI products. But while last year's Davos was dominated by hype around AI agents and overwrought hand-wringing that the debut of DeepSeek's R1 model, which happened during 2025's WEF, could mean the capital-intensive plans of the U.S. AI companies were for naught, this year's AI discussions seem more sober and grounded.