AI fears have been the cause of downturns and downright crashes in recent weeks and months. Here’s why the market is so spooked.

While ChatGPT has become the Kleenex of the AI world, there are tonnes of tools out there that are - in some ways - outstripping the work that OpenAI has been doing. One such company that is downright neck-and-neck is Anthropic and its Claude product. We've written abut some of the research work it has done before (be kind of afraid).

While AI has been heralded as this great assistant for all-things-work and a lightning-rod for business productivity, nobody can quite figure out how to integrate it into everyday life just yet. Models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and tonnes of others still require a lot of manual input. Often, these tools stop at text responses, image generation or light video work.

This week though, Anthropic with Claude showed off what has everyone invested in SaaS and cloud computing companies so worried. With the release of its new model - called Sonnet 4.6 - Anthropic showed how Claude can help, not just for business stuff, but also your personal to-do list.

This takes it from the office all the way into your everyday life.

In a video posted to its social channels, Claude is shown doing rudimentary everyday tasks on your to-do list that normally take tonnes of manual processing.

Stuff like buying birthday gifts that are on budget through your browser, renewing a driver's license, doing your expenses, shifting meetings back and forth in your diary and so on.

It's this sort of thing that has big investors spooked when it comes to software companies: many don't know where or how AI will be used, potentially to replace the core business models that these companies have built billions on.

We saw it recently with Xero, where both I and the company's CEO tried to replicate a core accounting program using nothing but Claude's suite of tools. She said she couldn't do it "easily", and when I got right down to it, neither could I. "Easily", being the operative word.

Instead, Xero made big moves about how it's embracing AI to give the data it already has on its customers the edge so they can do their tasks faster and make their offering better.

Others like Salesforce and Oracle, for example, are still struggling to articulate this message, and that's where the panic comes in.

When we first saw ChatGPT and Claude burst onto the scene, nobody knew they'd be used like this. And until big businesses can show how they're using AI rather than trying to push against it, the panic is likely set to continue.