Anthropic's Claude Co-work Sparks 'SaaS-pocalypse,' Indian IT Faces Billions in Losses

• Anthropic's new AI tool, Claude Co-work, caused a sharp 8% decline in the Nifty IT index in early February 2026, wiping out 2.5 trillion rupees from Indian tech companies' market value.
• Claude Co-work offers industry-specific automation, handling entire workflows like legal contracts, code management, and data analysis without human intervention, sparking fears of a 'SaaS-pocalypse' for IT services.
• Rahul Patil, an Indian-origin tech leader and Anthropic's CTO since October 2025, is at the center of this development, with his work being dubbed the 'Patil Effect' on Wall Street.
• Patil, a Bengaluru native with a background at Microsoft, Amazon Kinesis, Oracle, and Stripe, focused on optimizing Claude for large-scale enterprise use, improving infrastructure, speed, and cost efficiency.
• Anthropic, now valued at $183 billion with $13 billion in funding and over $5 billion revenue run-rate, is opening a major office in Bengaluru, its second global hub, to leverage Indian talent.