What Happened?
Shares of enterprise workflow automation company ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) fell 6.3% in the afternoon session after the "AI replacement" narrative reached a fever pitch following the release of new models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
The simultaneous debut of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI's "Frontier" agent platform raised concerns that autonomous agents are no longer just tools, but new operating systems that can cannibalize traditional software. This suggests that specialized applications might be reduced to mere features within frontier models, rendering legacy seat-based licensing models increasingly obsolete.
The catalyst is the models' unprecedented agentic power. Opus 4.6’s "software hunting" capability allows it to autonomously audit and patch complex codebases, while OpenAI's Frontier platform bypasses traditional CRM and ticketing interfaces to perform enterprise work directly. By commoditizing sophisticated workflows into low-cost API calls, these releases threaten the recurring revenue of software giants. As AI builds bespoke tools on demand, the market is aggressively repricing the entire software application layer.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
ServiceNow’s shares are somewhat volatile and have had 11 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 2 days ago when the stock dropped 7.4% on the news that fears of disruption from artificial intelligence spooked investors, leading to a broad-based sell-off. The market witnessed a "basket-style reaction," a term for when investors reduce exposure to an entire segment without differentiating between individual company business models. The negative sentiment was widespread, pulling down all of the Magnificent Seven stocks and sending the S&P 500 Information Technology Sector down nearly 3%.
ServiceNow is down 30.2% since the beginning of the year, and at $102.88 per share, it is trading 50.8% below its 52-week high of $208.94 from July 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of ServiceNow’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $872.01.
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