Anthropic CEO Predicts SaaS Pivot as AI Coding Surges

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies will need moats other than the complexity of writing software to preserve their businesses in the age of artificial intelligence that can code and write software, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Tuesday (May 5).

Speaking during Anthropic’s livestreamed event The Briefing: Financial Services, Amodei said companies of any significant size have other moats, and they will have to lean on those as AI makes it cheaper to write software. In addition, new moats “that we can’t conceive of yet” may arise in the world of AI, he said.

The amount of software available is going to increase due to the lower cost of production, but there’s no telling if that software will come from today’s incumbent SaaS providers or new companies, Amodei said.

“I think individual SaaS companies, it’s very possible for them to lose market value, go bankrupt, completely go bust,” Amodei said. “But it depends on the response, right? I think there are incumbents today that are going to see very clearly, ‘We have a lot of moat here, the moats here are going away, we’re really going to pivot and we’ll do better than we did before.’ And there are others who are not going to pay attention, who are going to be blindsided, and they’re going to have a really bad time.”

PYMNTS reported in April that AI coding agents are seen as a threat to enterprise software, much as cloud computing and mobile were seen as dangers to the category in the past.

In February, the launch of Anthropic’s Cowork legal plug-in sparked a selloff that wiped $285 billion from tech stocks within 24 hours.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman said in April that AI will be “enormously disruptive” but also a “huge opportunity.” Software firms that fail to lean in “are in trouble,” Garman said.

UBS analysts wrote in April that the latest AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI are a threat to enterprise software companies. They added that the software incumbents most likely to be safe from threats posed by AI are those that secure and manage corporate data.