An Indian-born executive is now at the centre of a market shock that wiped out billions of dollars from global software and IT services firms. Rahul Patil, the chief technology officer of AI startup Anthropic since October 2025, is being credited with driving the shift behind the company’s latest Claude release, which jolted investors and triggered sharp sell-offs across technology stocks in early February 2026, The Times of India has reported.Also Read: Rs 2.5 lakh crore wiped out in 3 days as IT stocks crash. Is India’s tech story at risk?Anthropic’s newest version of Claude did more than improve chatbot performance. It introduced industry-specific tools that can run full workflows on their own-- from reviewing legal contracts to managing code and documents without human supervision.Indian markets reacted fast. The Nifty IT index lost nearly 8% in sell-off and erased roughly ₹2.5 lakh crore in market value over the last three trading sessions.Two triggers that rattled marketsThe sell-off came from two fronts.Anthropic launched new automation tools for its Claude Cowork agent designed to automate tasks across legal, sales, marketing and data analysis — professional services long seen as major beneficiaries of the AI era.At the same time, Palantir claimed its AI platform can now complete SAP migrations in weeks instead of years. That second claim hit markets hard because ERP implementation had been considered relatively safe from AI disruption until now.Also Read: 100% of Claude's code effectively AI-written, says Anthropic CPOThe ‘Patil effect’ at AnthropicAt the centre of this change is Rahul Patil. Appointed CTO in October 2025, Patil was brought in to make Claude enterprise-ready at massive scale, with a focus on infrastructure, speed and cost, TOI reported.Patil pushed teams to optimise how Claude runs on costly chips, getting more output from the same hardware. Techniques such as better memory use and faster decoding cut the cost of running the AI. He also reorganised teams so product, infrastructure and AI engineers work closely together.The payoff is that Anthropic can now afford to offer always-on AI agents directly to companies rather than just selling access to its models. On Wall Street, this shift is being called the “Patil effect,” TOI noted.Why investors panickedWhat rattled investors was not just a smarter chatbot.Anthropic’s newest version of Claude did more than improve performance. It launched plugins that allow AI to complete full workflows end-to-end without constant human input.The move sparked what traders are calling the “SaaSpocalypse.”“We call it the ‘SaaSpocalypse,’ an apocalypse for software-as-a-service stocks,” Jeffrey Favuzza of Jefferies told Bloomberg. “Trading is very much ‘get me out’ style selling.”Patil's ladder: From Bengaluru to the global AI stagePatil’s rise to the top role follows a long global career. He studied engineering at PES University in Bengaluru before moving to the US for higher studies. He earned his MS from Arizona State University and later completed an MBA from the University of Washington.He spent nearly nine years at Microsoft, then moved to Amazon Kinesis at AWS, and later joined Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as senior vice president overseeing more than 30 products across compute, storage, security and monitoring services.Before joining Anthropic, he spent five years at Stripe, where he led engineering and global operations.Announcing his move, Patil wrote on LinkedIn: “I am grateful to join the humble, brilliant, hardworking, and conscientious crew at Anthropic that has ignited much of the imagination and excitement around the world!”Anthropic’s Bengaluru expansion and the road aheadAnthropic is set to open a major office in Bengaluru, only its second global hub after Tokyo. The move aims to tap Indian talent and build local AI infrastructure.Anthropic is valued at about $183 billion after a $13 billion funding round led by ICONIQ, with investors such as Amazon, Fidelity and Lightspeed. Its revenue run-rate crossed $5 billion by mid-2025, the company has said.
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