The "SaaSpocalypse" began on the 3rd of February 2026 - with $285bn wiped off technology companies on the public markets. Reading into it, I was surprised to see mention of Anthropic launching a legal tool. I use Claude a lot, and I hadn't heard of it. A cursory web search didn't bring anything up.
It turns out the "legal tool" in question is a collection of markdown files in the knowledge-work-plugin on GitHub.
It's approximately 156KB - which means for every byte of markdown, nearly $1mn was wiped off SaaS company valuations.
SaaS has a markdown-sized hole in its moat
While the immediate sell-off feels panic-induced - a few thousand words in a text file do not justify this level of drawdown in company valuations - there is a serious point at hand.
As I wrote in AI agents are starting to eat SaaS at the end of last year, SaaS has a serious issue with agentic tooling being able to replicate software.
This incident really leans into a deeper issue though that I've been thinking about. Instead of SaaS being replaced by "agentically-built" SaaS, what if people just don't need (as much) SaaS?
Increasingly I'm realising that agentic workflows often completely bypass SaaS, and actually operate on a much higher level than most SaaS products.
For example - to take legal review - there are dozens of legal review SaaS products out there. Some are "AI native", most old school SaaS UIs (and let's not forget Microsoft Word with probably the most marketshare).
All of these are being disrupted by agentic tooling. Instead of having a UI with buttons to click to do various tasks, you instead just ask the agent exactly what you need, and it goes away and does it.
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