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Billions of pounds were wiped off the value of media and financial data companies such as Relx and the London Stock Exchange Group on fears over the impact of new AI tools on their businesses.
Relx took a hit of more than £6bn alone as investors were spooked by the launch by AI firm Anthropic of new productivity tools for its agentic Claude Cowork facility that can help automate legal work.
Relx dropped almost 15 per cent on Tuesday, reversing the fortunes of one of the best-performing stocks in recent years and a company widely regarded as one of the UK’s brightest hopes for AI success. Relx owns the leading legal information and analytics platform LexisNexis.
Shares of rival publishers and analytics firms that support legal services also fell sharply, with Wolters Kluwer down 9 per cent on Euronext and Thomson Reuters almost 15 per cent lower in the US, wiping more than $6bn off its market value.
Anthropic’s new legal tool — which promises to automate contract reviews, compliance workflows and legal briefings — was among those launched to automate specific tasks within a company that also covers marketing and customer support.
Shares in European advertising companies also dropped sharply on Tuesday, with Publicis and WPP both down 9 per cent, while Omnicom fell almost 8 per cent in the US.
Traditional media companies such as Relx have reinvented themselves as data-led analytics firms, with hopes that they will be among Europe’s AI winners given their access to proprietary data and research.
Relx was in the UK’s top 10 most valuable companies last year, just above Barclays, but recent investor fears over US tech companies bringing in AI tools aimed specifically at corporate clients have begun to erode its share price.
LSEG has a deal with Anthropic to license some of its financial markets data to Claude.
The group also derives substantial earnings from Workspace, a data and news competitor to Bloomberg’s ubiquitous terminals. Workspace has more than 350,000 users among portfolio managers, investment banks and wealth advisers.
Shares in LSEG dropped by almost a tenth on Tuesday while shares in FactSet, which also competes in financial data, dropped 8.6 per cent in New York.