Anthropic's Cowork Plugin Marketplace Is Eating SaaS - and Wall Street Knows It
Anthropic launched 13 new MCP connectors, department-specific plugins, and a private enterprise marketplace for Claude Cowork, deepening the SaaS disruption that has already wiped $285 billion off software stocks since January.
6 min read
Anthropic is no longer just building AI models. It's building the platform that replaces the software those models were supposed to help you use.
On February 24, the company hosted a virtual event called "Briefing: Enterprise Agents" and announced 13 new MCP connectors, department-specific plugin templates, and a private enterprise marketplace - all for Claude Cowork, its agentic desktop product that has already wiped $285 billion off SaaS stocks in a single trading day. The expansion is the clearest signal yet that Anthropic sees enterprise software replacement - not assistance - as the endgame.
TL;DR
- Anthropic shipped 13 new MCP connectors for Claude Cowork, including Google Workspace, DocuSign, FactSet, LegalZoom, and Harvey
- Enterprise admins can now build private plugin marketplaces to distribute custom AI agents across departments - HR, finance, design, and engineering
- Since the original Cowork announcement on January 30, ServiceNow is down 23%, Salesforce 22%, Intuit 33%, and Thomson Reuters 31%
- Named partners saw their stocks rally after the February 24 briefing - Thomson Reuters surged 11% - revealing a new market dynamic where Anthropic partnership is becoming an existential hedge
- OpenAI is running the same playbook with its Frontier platform, making this a two-front war on the SaaS business model
What Anthropic Actually Shipped
13 Connectors, One Platform
The new MCP connectors span the full range of enterprise software categories. Google Workspace gets three connectors (Drive, Calendar, and Gmail). DocuSign, Apollo, Clay, Outreach, SimilarWeb, MSCI, LegalZoom, FactSet, WordPress, and Harvey round out the set. Each connector lets Claude Cowork read from and act on data inside these systems - not as a chatbot answering questions about your files, but as an agent executing multi-step workflows across applications.
The most telling feature is cross-application orchestration. Claude can now pull data from an Excel spreadsheet, run analysis, and create a PowerPoint presentation while maintaining context between the two applications. That workflow alone replaces a meaningful chunk of what junior analysts, consultants, and operations staff do every day.
| Connector | Category | What It Enables |
|---|---|---|
| Google Drive, Calendar, Gmail | Productivity | File access, scheduling, email management |
| DocuSign | Legal | Contract review, signature workflows |
| FactSet, MSCI | Finance | Market data analysis, portfolio research |
| LegalZoom, Harvey | Legal | Legal document drafting, compliance checks |
| Apollo, Clay, Outreach | Sales | Lead enrichment, outreach automation |
| SimilarWeb | Analytics | Competitive intelligence, traffic analysis |
| WordPress | Content | Publishing, content management |
The Private Marketplace
The structurally important part isn't the connectors - it is the marketplace. Enterprise admins can now set up a private plugin store through a new "Customize" menu in Cowork's admin settings. From there, they populate the store with Anthropic's public plugins, partner-built plugins, or custom plugins built from templates or from scratch.
"We expect that every knowledge worker will feel that way about Cowork," said Kate Jensen, Anthropic's Head of Americas, drawing a direct comparison to how engineers already treat Claude Code as indispensable.
Matt Piccolella, a product manager at Anthropic, described the vision in blunter terms: "dozens, hundreds, or even thousands" of plugins could be built as "mini apps" distributed internally across teams. The prebuilt templates already cover HR (offer letters, onboarding plans), finance (data analysis, reporting), design (UX critique frameworks, user research plans), and engineering (standup summaries, deployment tasks).
The plugin marketplace is rolling out to Claude Team and Enterprise subscribers. The Excel-to-PowerPoint orchestration is in research preview for paid Mac and Windows desktop users.
The Market Reaction
The SaaSpocalypse in Numbers
The February 24 briefing didn't land in a vacuum. Since Anthropic first announced Claude Cowork on January 30, the enterprise software sector has been in free fall.
| Company | Drop Since Jan 30 | Sector |
|---|---|---|
| Intuit | -33% | Financial Software |
| Thomson Reuters | -31% | Legal/Data |
| ServiceNow | -23% | IT Service Management |
| Salesforce | -22% | CRM |
| Snowflake | -20% | Data/Analytics |
| LegalZoom | -20% | Legal Tech |
| London Stock Exchange Group | -14% | Financial Data |
On the worst single day - February 3 - around $285 billion in market capitalization evaporated from US software stocks alone. The Goldman Sachs software basket fell roughly 6%, its steepest daily loss since the April tariff downturn.
"We call it the SaaSpocalypse - an apocalypse for software-as-a-service stocks. Trading is very much 'get-me-out' style selling," said Jeffrey Favuzza, an equity trader at Jefferies.
Partners Rally, Independents Fall
Here is where the story gets interesting. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF dropped nearly 5% on the Monday before Anthropic's February 24 event. Investors braced for another wave of disruption.
Then the briefing happened - and the companies named as integration partners saw their stocks bounce. Thomson Reuters surged more than 11%. DocuSign, LegalZoom, and FactSet all rallied. The message from the market was clear: if you're part of Anthropic's ecosystem, you survive. If you aren't, you're on the wrong side of the trade.
This is the new dynamic. The question for enterprise software companies is no longer "will AI disrupt our business?" It's "are we a plugin or a casualty?"
What This Means for Enterprise Software
The Platform Lock-In Play
Anthropic's 80% of revenue comes from business customers. The company is valued at $380 billion. And it's building the exact infrastructure - marketplace, admin controls, department-level deployment, custom plugin development - that turns a subscription AI product into an enterprise platform.
The playbook is familiar. Apple built the App Store and made itself the gatekeeper. Salesforce built AppExchange and made itself the center of CRM. Anthropic is building a plugin marketplace and positioning Claude Cowork as the operating layer between knowledge workers and the software they currently use. The difference is speed: it took Apple years to build that gravity. Anthropic is doing it in weeks.
OpenAI Is Running the Same Play
Anthropic is not alone. OpenAI launched its Frontier platform in early February, which similarly lets enterprises build AI agents that interact with company software systems. The two companies are converging on the same strategic bet: the future of enterprise software is not better SaaS tools - it is AI agents that use those tools on your behalf, and eventually replace them entirely.
The SaaS companies caught in the middle face an impossible choice. Partner with the AI platforms and risk becoming a commodity data layer. Refuse to partner and risk being automated out of existence. Some - like Thomson Reuters and FactSet - have chosen integration and been rewarded by the market. Others are still deciding.
The enterprise software industry spent two decades convincing companies to pay per seat for cloud tools. Anthropic just launched a marketplace that lets one AI agent do the work of dozens of those seats. The math is not subtle. Neither is Wall Street's reaction. The SaaSpocalypse isn't a panic - it's a repricing. And the companies that don't pick a side will be the ones left holding the bill.
Sources:
- Anthropic launches new push for enterprise agents with plug-ins for finance, engineering, and design - TechCrunch
- Anthropic updates Claude Cowork tool built to give the average office worker a productivity boost - CNBC
- Anthropic rolls out Claude Cowork updates across the enterprise - Tech Startups
- Why Anthropic's new Claude plugins sparked global selloff in software stocks - TradingView/Invezz
- Anthropic Adds 13 Enterprise Plugins to Claude Cowork - WinBuzzer
- Anthropic expands Claude Cowork with new enterprise plugins - Business Today
- Claude Cowork SaaS Apocalypse on Wall Street: $285 Billion Destroyed - Xpert Digital
