Software stocks selloff: PLTR, MSFT drop on Anthropic's 'Mythos' model fears By Investing.com
Investing.com -- Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR) fell 7% Thursday as software stocks declined following new AI product launches and comments from short seller Michael Burry about competitive threats.Get premium commodity market insights with InvestingPro subscription
The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF dropped 3.7%, with top holdings including Palantir, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and Palo Alto Networks all trading lower. The selloff came after Meta unveiled a new artificial intelligence model and Anthropic launched Claude tools for building agents. Ongoing fears about Anthropic's powerful new Mythos model also impacted the sector.
Burry specifically highlighted Palantir's vulnerability to competition from Anthropic, writing that "Anthropic is eating $PLTR Palantir's lunch. That massive boost from $9B to $30B ARR at Anthropic is because Anthropic offers the easier, cheaper, intuitive solution for businesses. PLTR can have government, which is low margin and small."
The pressure on software stocks intensified following Anthropic's release of its Mythos model, which demonstrated significant improvements in software engineering tasks. According to Anthropic's system card, Mythos showed a 17 percentage point improvement in Terminal Bench 2.0 and 13 percentage point improvement in SWE bench-verified benchmarks compared to the previous Opus 4.6 model.
Kotak Institutional Equities analyst Kawaljeet Saluja commented, "Anthropic's Mythos model exhibits a step-jump in benchmark performance across software engineering tasks, a deviation from the trajectory of incremental/moderate improvements in the recent past. Mythos provides a large improvement in agentic software development, based on qualitative assessments. We believe that the model raises near- to medium-term disruption risks for IT services with the caveat that model capabilities are largely unproven in real-world scenarios due to a lack of a public release."