What Happened?
A number of stocks fell in the afternoon session after a confluence of high-profile AI talent departures from Alphabet, and a regulatory overhang pulled the entire communication-services and software complex lower.
Alphabet fell roughly 6%. Microsoft slipped as well. When the two largest software-adjacent megacaps decline together, the sector indices follow mechanically given their index weight. But the deeper driver was the market's persistent fear that AI agents would erode the subscription model that underpins traditional enterprise software economics. That fear had been compounding all year. Salesforce trades around $152, down roughly 43% year-to-date and near its 52-week low. Adobe fell approximately 49% over the past year and has not traded this cheap on earnings in over a decade.
The previous week's Accenture collapse, a near-20% single-day drop after the consulting giant cut its growth outlook and explicitly cited AI compressing demand for traditional IT services acted as a fresh confirmation of the thesis. If the largest IT services firm in the world is signaling that AI is eating its billable hours, investors extend the same logic to the software vendors whose products those hours configure.
The counterargument is that the selling has become indiscriminate. Salesforce is a Rule-of-40 company retiring 10% of its shares through a $25 billion buyback, carrying the largest AI revenue line in the category, and it is acquiring usage-based billing platforms like m3ter precisely to monetize AI agent actions rather than seats. Monness upgraded the stock to Buy the previous week on valuation. The market is pricing the cannibalization as if it already happened; the income statements might be indicating otherwise. But until these companies can prove that AI revenue scales faster than it erodes the legacy subscription base, software might remain in the penalty box even on days when the rest of tech (especially chip stocks) is celebrating.
The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks.
Among others, the following stocks were impacted:
- E-commerce Software company GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) fell 3.6%. Is now the time to buy GoDaddy? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Communications Platform company Bandwidth (NASDAQ: BAND) fell 2.5%. Is now the time to buy Bandwidth? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Developer Operations company GitLab (NASDAQ: GTLB) fell 4.2%. Is now the time to buy GitLab? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
Zooming In On GitLab (GTLB)
GitLab’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 40 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 13 days ago when the stock dropped 2.5% on the news that Anthropic released new models (Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5) which were described as built for "the hardest knowledge work and coding problems."
Mythos had been restricted for roughly two months under Project Glasswing, a managed rollout to select governments and enterprises designed to contain its cybersecurity risk profile before a wider release. That matters because the SaaSpocalypse thesis gets reinforced every time a more capable AI agent arrives.
When Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in January, it triggered a $285 billion rout in software stocks in a single session, with Goldman's US software basket falling. This is another iteration of the same logic: if an agent available for $20 a month can now complete long-run, multi-step knowledge work, the case for more expensive per-seat enterprise subscriptions gets harder to defend with each new model generation.
Adding to the weakness, US Central Command confirmed an American Apache helicopter had gone down near the coast of Oman, and Trump said the US "must respond" to what he described as an Iranian attack over the Strait of Hormuz. The Apache helicopter incident gave the software sector a macro headwind on top of those pressures. Software is a long-duration asset, its valuation is rooted in future cash flows, making it particularly exposed to any development that firms up the case for sustained higher interest rates. An Iranian attack on US military assets over the Strait of Hormuz is precisely that kind of development.
GitLab is down 29.4% since the beginning of the year, and at $25.53 per share, it is trading 50% below its 52-week high of $51.04 from November 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of GitLab’s shares at the IPO in October 2021 would now be looking at an investment worth $245.70.
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