Shares in several prominent public SaaS companies fell approximately 10% heading into February, wiping out $300 billion in value. One of the instigators was Anthropic’s release of Claude Cowork with plugins in legal, marketing, and other business functions. Investors also read how AI writes 90% of Claude’s code, while technologists noticed that Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 Codex hit 80%+ on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark. Watching the news on those days, I heard financial analysts suggest that enterprises might walk away from their expensive SaaS contracts and replace them with AI capabilities, including in-house developed AI agents. While a collapse in the SaaS business model seems improbable, recent advances in AI are a paradigm shift in how organizations develop and procure software capabilities.

Full report : AI’s software development capabilities and its ability to gain business function expertise is existential threat for SaaS businesses.