Anthropic’s 11 open source Claude Cowork plug-ins promise low-cost automation for enterprises, but investors fear the move could erode India’s labour-heavy IT services model, sending tech stocks tumbling over 6%.
Anthropic has released 11 open-source plug-ins for its Claude Cowork platform, making enterprise AI automation freely accessible to developers and businesses and allowing companies to integrate, customise, and deploy workflows without proprietary lock-in.
The move immediately rattled markets in India, where IT services depend heavily on large teams and billable hours. Indian IT export shares slumped about 6.3 per cent overall, with the NSE/Nifty IT index heading for its worst session since March 2020 as all 10 constituents traded in the red.
Blue-chip stocks bore the brunt of the sell-off. Infosys fell around 7.3 per cent, TCS 5.8 per cent, HCLTech 5.1 per cent, Wipro 3.9 per cent, LTI Mindtree 5.9 per cent, and Coforge 6.5 per cent.
Investor concerns centre on the plug-ins’ ability to automate tasks across legal, sales, marketing, analytics, coding, testing, and documentation — work traditionally handled by large offshore teams.
“As Indian enterprises integrate Claude for critical coding workflows, dependency on large vendor teams may decline, squeezing billable hours and margins. Anthropic’s advanced AI systems also threaten entry-level talent pool at Indian IT firms by replacing routine development and testing tasks,” said Ambrish Shah, Analyst, Systematix Group.
The ripple effects extended overseas, with the Nasdaq Composite slipping 1.43 per cent and major technology names such as Nvidia, Adobe, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon trading lower.
With open source tools lowering costs and expanding access, investors increasingly view AI-driven automation not as an assistive upgrade but as a structural threat to India’s staffing-intensive IT outsourcing model.
