Good morning. In my column this week, I spoke to Anthropic and other companies to understand the technology behind this week’s rout of software and data stocks and what these new long-thinking agents mean for businesses for the tech sector and beyond.

Leaders need to pay attention.

AI agents have the potential to draw value out of almost every sector of the economy, not just software and data. That isn’t inevitable, though. Companies can use AI to create value of their own, provided leadership keeps pace with technological changes and their downstream impact on business.

That’s a particular challenge, given the novelty and complexity of AI, and the fact that the pace of innovation has picked up in recent months. The Opus 4.5 model that led to the stock selloff was launched last November, and yesterday Anthropic unveiled an even more powerful model, Opus 4.6.

Last year, AI was a narrative. Broad themes moved stock prices and shaped corporate  investments.

This year AI has moved beyond the stage of abstraction. It’s no longer something that may or may not hit its stride sometime in the future. It’s here now.

• At Goldman Sachs, engineers from Anthropic have spent six months building autonomous systems for “time-intensive, high-volume back-office work,” CNBC reports this morning.

Shares of companies in the legal services profession were hit hard this week, given that one of the open-source plug-ins for Anthropic’s Cowork product focuses on that profession.

But LegalZoom CEO Jeff Stibel said he approaches AI as an accelerant for his business and so-called Main Street companies. The online legal-services platform has an in-house law firm and an independent network of more than 1,000 attorneys, as well as concierge service agents. It also takes an agnostic approach to client technology.

In Stibel’s view, AI makes it easier to start a business, driving clients to specialized services that support them. LegalZoom is moving from a search-and-answer approach to an emphasis on execution and a broader solution that clients trust.

“AI provides the insight, but LegalZoom provides the trusted solution,” he said.

AI poses a major leadership challenge for companies, but they can meet it, especially if they get an early start.

“We weren’t going to wait for AI to force our hand, we forced the shift ourselves,” Stibel said. “We have deliberately been shifting our business model for the past two years since I joined, specifically to take advantage of this AI opportunity, evidenced by the fact that our fastest growing sector at LegalZoom is now human-in-the-loop services.”

How are you and your company approaching AI from the leadership perspective? Are you a first-mover, a fast-follower or taking a wait-and-see approach when it comes to investing capital and driving organizational change? Use the links at the end of this newsletter and let us know.

We will be at The WSJ Technology Council Summit in Palo Alto, Calif., this Tuesday and Wednesday, hosting panel discussions and, most importantly, meeting your peers. The Summit is a chance to learn from some of the brightest leaders in IT, and we’ll bring those insights back to you through stories, social posts and our newsletter.

And we want you to be part of the conversation. If you can’t attend the Summit but have an issue you’d like addressed, let us know. We’ll work your questions into discussions when possible and share key takeaways in the Morning Download.

The week that was. It was an incredible week for Anthropic and for the stock market. Here is a great summary of what happened by the WSJ's Bradley Olson. 

And the week is not over yet.

This week's steep selloff in software stocks is spreading to the debt market. Last year the worry was about AI imploding--remember the bubble? Now it appears that AI disruption is on track to explode everthing else. Shares of software companies were the first to slide in the wake of the Anthropic news, now the prices of software-company bonds and loans are also dropping. The WSJ reports that software has come to assume an outsize presence in the corporate-debt market. A downturn in the sector has the potential to drag down other areas of the market.

Anthropic triggers a second market meltdown. The AI startup said its new Claude Opus 4.6 model, released Thursday, improves on the coding skills of Opus 4.5 and can be used to conduct research and create documents and files, Cue more panic. Barron's reports that data and research stocks fell sharply after the announcement. 

It wasn't all about Anthropic. Rival OpenAI this week launched a new agentic coding model, GPT-5.3 Codex, and Frontier, a platform that helps companies build, deploy and oversee AI agents.

AI's biggest spenders have not been spared, in an odd twist.

Amazon.com shares took a hit after the company rolled out plans for a big jump in AI-related spending and reported cloud-growth numbers that trailed its biggest rivals, the WSJ's Sean McLain reports.

It’s an odd twist: Amazon is getting hit for investing in the same AI boom that has investors dumping stocks seen as vulnerable to it.

Amazon now expects about $200 billion in capital spending for 2026, nearly 60% more than last year and far above Wall Street expectations. With tech giants pouring billions into new data centers to feed the AI boom, investors are watching closely for any sign that cloud demand might not keep up

AWS revenue grew 24% to $35.6 billion, beating expectations but falling short of competitor momentum. Microsoft said Azure jumped 39% last quarter, while Alphabet reported 48% growth in its cloud unit. The company argued that growth rates alone don’t tell the full story.

$700 billion. What Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon and Oracle collectively plan to spend on AI-related computing demands in 2026.

13%. The percentage of the Morningstar LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan Index made up of software, more than double the share of the next largest sector. 

The auto industry is racing to replace Chinese code. New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud, WSJ reports. It won't be easy: Carmakers typically buy electronics from big suppliers, which sometimes source software from smaller suppliers in China. The move is “one of the most consequential and complex auto regulations in decades,” according to Hilary Cain, head of policy at trade group the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. “It requires a deep examination of supply chains and aggressive compliance timelines.”

Goldman is working with Anthropic. Goldman Sachs has been co-developing autonomous AI agents with Anthropic to automate functions like trade accounting and client onboarding. CIO Marco Argenti tells CNBC that Claude-based “digital co-workers” sharply cut processing time and have proved surprisingly strong beyond coding, including in compliance. 

Will smoking be next? The European Commission said TikTok might be breaching the bloc’s online-content rules due to what officials called the short-form video platform’s addictive designs, such as infinite scroll and autoplay, WSJ reports.

Meanwhile, there is no joy in gamer-ville. Gamers for the first time in three decades, won’t have a new Nvidia graphics chip to look forward to this year. The AI chip maker cited the global memory chip shortage–thanks a lot, AI boom–for the loss. The Information has more.

China’s genius plan to win the AI race is already paying off (FT)

Hollywood Is Losing Audiences to AI Fatigue (Wired)

The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline (Bloomberg)

A new wave of popular anger is rising in Iran, as people enraged by last month’s mass killings of protesters vent their antipathy for the regime despite the risks of a continuing crackdown. (WSJ)

Some of the world’s largest ocean carriers, port operators and infrastructure investors are circling the biggest container-handling facility at America’s busiest East Coast port. (