Anthropic on Friday rolled out a powerful new security feature within its Claude AI model, marking a major push into AI-driven protection tools.
The announcement comes months after Anthropic’s competitor OpenAI said in December that it is investing in stronger safeguards and defensive capabilities as AI models grow more advanced and play a larger role in cybersecurity.
The US-based company’s latest launch rattled investors, sparking fears that AI-driven security capabilities could disrupt traditional cybersecurity offerings and upend the competitive landscape.
Shares of several cybersecurity companies plunged on Friday after Anthropic published a blog post announcing the launch.
What is Claude Code Security?
Anthropic’s latest offering has been defined as a new capability built into Claude Code on the web. The firm also said the update is available in a limited research preview for now.
The AI research and safety company said that the new tool “scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.” The offering allows teams to find and fix security issues that traditional methods often miss.
Looking ahead, Anthropic said it is anticipating that a significant share of the world’s code will be scanned by AI in the near future, given how effective models have become at finding long-hidden bugs and security issues.
“Attackers will use AI to find exploitable weaknesses faster than ever. But defenders who move quickly can find those same weaknesses, patch them, and reduce the risk of an attack,” it said in the blog post.
Legacy cybersecurity companies struggle
Among the hardest hit was Crowdstrike, which fell 8%, while Cloudflare slumped 8.1%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 5.5%, Rubrik fell over 7%, SailPoint shed 9.4%, and Okta declined 9.2% amid the broad-based sell-off on Friday. Many other companies suffered a similar fate in just one trading session.
Much of the recent selling has been driven by a wave of new AI tools unveiled by companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Alphabet. Investors are increasingly concerned that the rise of “vibe code” — using AI to generate software code — could enable users to build their own applications with minimal reliance on traditional vendors, according to Bloomberg.
The fear is that such capabilities may erode demand for legacy cybersecurity software products, putting pressure on companies’ growth prospects, margins, and long-term pricing power across the sector.
The sharp volatility across the group shows how quickly companies can be labeled as potential AI losers in a fast-evolving landscape. Cloudflare, for instance, has been viewed as a proxy for Anthropic’s rise to prominence. The stock had surged in late January amid reports of growing adoption of an open-sourced AI assistant built to work with Anthropic’s Claude model.
