When Anthropic released its legal plugin for Claude Cowork on January 29th, it resulted in a dramatic AI-driven market sell off. The announcement sparked a $285 billion rout across software, financial services and asset management sectors, with Goldman Sachs software stocks especially hard hit. The significance investors focused on was Anthropic’s apparent shift from model supplier to application layer and workflow owner, a move that directly threatened the business models of established legal and compliance software providers and subject matter experts working therein.
Recent events have got me thinking about the how the legislative efforts around AI aren’t really targeted at the issues we’re seeing at the cutting edge of AI development in the consumer space - at the harm users can do to themselves with the large number of AI tools they themselves are using in day to day life. For example, let’s look at the new AI personal assistant that’s sweeping social media.
The rise of AI tools is transforming the workforce - how will this effect day to day compliance and legal work? It turns out that despite modern AI being able to write thousands of lines of computer code a minute, in its current form it’s unsuited for legal analysis and woe behold anyone who trusts it to do that. What will it take for this to change, and when can we expect our own robot lawyers?
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have weathered the hype to become surprisingly durable analogues to real world currencies. But the ultimate goal of replacing the financial systems we have in place will remain elusive till they can emulate one critical aspect of modern monetary systems.
Making things simple can be surprisingly difficult. However, when after days of work what you have to show is one easy to follow diagram or a concise paragraph that can explain everything, that’s the sign you’re on the right track. By making things simple you’re not proving what you’re working on wasn’t that complicated in the first place, but rather your skill and effort has been spent empowering anyone - including the busy c-suite executive - to be able to comprehend the issue properly.