AI Threatens a Wall Street Cash Cow: Financial and Legal Data

For years it seemed like a surefire business model: amass vast troves of financial data and sell it to Wall Street for a premium. Then Claude came along.

Shares of companies such as S&P Global, MSCI, Intercontinental Exchange, London Stock Exchange Group LSEG -2.03%decrease; red down pointing triangle and FactSet Research Systems FDS 0.24%increase; green up pointing triangle all tumbled this week after fast-growing artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic unveiled a new suite of tools for automating legal tasks.

The new legal plug-in for Anthropic's Cowork assistant, powered by its AI model Claude, didn't seem to have much to do with financial data. Nonetheless, LSEG—which has spent years pivoting away from its traditional stock-exchange business to selling data and analytics—slid 13% on Tuesday, and its shares dropped further Wednesday morning.