Tuesday’s sharp decline in cybersecurity stocks reflected those fears, as investors assessed the possible impact of a new security tool launched by Anthropic. The company’s latest feature, Claude Code Security, is designed to identify high-severity vulnerabilities in open-source software repositories and provide patches to fix the bugs, raising questions about how AI-driven tools could affect traditional cybersecurity service providers.
In Tuesday’s session, several cybersecurity and technology stocks came under sharp selling pressure, with some falling as much as 20%. TAC Infosec was among the worst hit, hitting a 20% lower circuit at Rs 415.70 on the NSE. TechD Cybersecurity dropped more than 14%, while Sattrix Information Security declined 5%. Exato Technologies slipped 3%.
Among other stocks, Sasken Technologies fell up to 3.2% to its day’s low of Rs 1,155 per share on the BSE Limited. Quick Heal Technologies declined more than 3%, while Expleo Solutions dropped nearly 5% to its intraday low of Rs 791 per share.
In the US, shares of CrowdStrike, Datadog and Zscaler fell around 11%, while those of Fortinet and Okta were down roughly 6%. Palo Alto Networks dropped 3% and SentinelOne was down by 5%.
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Anthropic said its Claude Code tool can be used to modernise legacy systems that run on COBOL. On Monday, Anthropic said Claude Code could automate much of the exploration and analysis that drives the complexity of COBOL modernisation.
Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL is a dominant programming system developed in the late 1950s and is commonly used in business data processing, including payment processing and retail transaction systems. According to Anthropic, an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US still rely on COBOL, making it a potential target for cost-efficient AI disruption.
“Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines and government. Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year,” Anthropic said in its latest blog post.
Should you be worried?
“What you’re seeing today is really the continuation of a panic-driven, narrative-led sell-off,” Shrenik Kothari, director, security and infrastructure analyst at Robert W. Baird, told Reuters.
Claude Code Security does not handle real-time security tasks such as detecting live intrusions, stopping attacks in progress or managing compiled software components in production, which are capabilities provided by other specialised security platforms, Kothari added.
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