TOI correspondent from Washington: Long before AI upstart Anthropic spooked the software services market and bled billions in market value from companies ranging from Accenture and Adobe to Infosys and TCS this week, Elon Musk noted the irony of its name, suggesting Misanthropic—disliking humankind and human society—may have been a better fit. But the man who’s at the center of the breathtaking jolt to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry is anything but a misanthrope. Rahul Patil, CTO of Anthropic, is an earthy, cricket-loving, dosa-chowing Bengaluru huduga (lad) whose head is not in the clouds, but whose career, spanning Microsoft to Amazon to Oracle, certainly has been.
That stratospheric arc has now placed Patil at the heart of what market analysts are calling the “SaaSpocalypse.” In the first week of February 2026, global technology stocks shuddered after Anthropic unveiled its most ambitious version of Claude yet. The result was swift and brutal: more than $285 billion in market value was erased across enterprise software, legal technology and IT services firms worldwide. Salesforce, Intuit and Adobe slid sharply. Legal information giants such as Thomson Reuters and RELX fell by double digits. Indian IT bellwethers Infosys and TCS lost around 7%, underscoring how deeply the shock rippled through global markets.
