European publishing and legal software companies have suffered sharp declines in their share prices after the US artificial intelligence firm Anthropic announced a tool aimed at companies’ in-house lawyers.
The UK publishing group Pearson’s shares fell by 4%, while the information and analytics firm Relx plunged nearly 11% on the London stock exchange, and the Dutch software company Wolters Kluwer dropped almost 9% in Amsterdam.
Stocks in the London Stock Exchange Group and the credit reporting company Experian fell by more than 7%, amid fears over AI’s impact on data companies.
Anthropic, the company behind the popular chatbot Claude, said its tool could automate legal work such as contract reviewing, non-disclosure agreement triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings and templated responses.
However, it said the plugin did not provide legal advice. “AI-generated analysis should be reviewed by licensed attorneys before being relied upon for legal decisions,” the startup said.
Anthropic also unveiled a number of other open-source tools to automate a range of professional activities, including sales and customer support.
The news will reignite fears of job losses caused by the AI boom. The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating as companies adopt more AI tools, and is being hit harder than rival large economies, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley.
More than a quarter (27%) of UK workers are worried their jobs could disappear in the next five years as a result of AI, a recent survey of thousands of employees showed. It found that British businesses reported an average 11.5% increase in productivity aided by AI. US businesses reported similar gains, but created more jobs than they cut.
In his annual Mansion House speech last month, the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said AI could destroy swathes of jobs in the capital. He said London was “at the sharpest edge of change” because of its reliance on white-collar workers in the finance and creative industries, and professional services such as law, accounting, consulting and marketing.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, its chief executive, and other former staff members from OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
