Stocks up, rebounding as Anthropic unveils uses for AI plugins
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S. February 24, 2026. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
NEW YORK, Feb 24 : Global shares rose on Tuesday after San Francisco-based startup Anthropic unveiled 10 new ways for business customers to use its AI plugins, which revived enthusiasm that AI would boost profits for businesses including in investment banking, human resources and engineering.
The previous session, stock prices fell as investors worried that heavy capital spending on AI may not translate into profits soon, and also were nervous about President Donald Trump's tariff policies.
Anthropic's release boosted stocks just weeks after other releases sparked a selloff in the software and services sectors.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection imposed a new tariff of 10 per cent on all goods not covered by exemptions. Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump's emergency tariffs were unlawful. Investors had feared Trump may follow through on a threat to impose 15 per cent tariffs.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.76 per cent, the S&P 500 gained 0.76 per cent, and the Nasdaq Composite was up 1 per cent.
Uncertainty from tariffs is starting to take a back seat, and the market is trying to understand the implications of AI for company earnings, said Ken Mahoney, president and chief executive at Mahoney Asset Management in New Jersey.
"We've already established that we're going to lose jobs with AI, and AI may in fact do things better and more efficiently than some of the older software programs out there, but then you start calculating that if these companies are going to let a lot of people go because of AI that means fewer licenses from the likes of Microsoft," Mahoney said.
"We went through all these areas and all that negativity, and it's nice to see it bouncing back to about half of where we were yesterday (Monday)," Mahoney said.
European stocks rose 0.23 per cent. Britain's FTSE finished a shade lower by 0.04 per cent.
MSCI's All-World index was up 0.52 per cent after dropping 0.62 per cent.
Shares of International Business Machines closed up 2.7 per cent. On Monday, IBM shares plunged more than 13 per cent, their biggest daily fall since late 2000. Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize a programming language run on the company's systems.
The sheer scale of corporate borrowing and spending on AI has made many investors nervous due largely to the outsized market weight of companies at the heart of the boom. AI chipmaker Nvidia, which reports earnings after the bell on Wednesday, accounts for around 8 per cent of the entire S&P 500. Nvidia rose 0.7 per cent.
"The biggest concern is margins. And margins, seemingly with new and cheaper technology, is something that's really bothersome to markets," Mahoney said.
The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes rose 0.6 basis point to 4.033 per cent. The 2-year note yield, which typically moves in step with interest rate expectations for the Federal Reserve, rose 2.5 basis points to 3.444 per cent.
In currencies, the yen weakened following a report that said Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi had conveyed her reservations about further interest rate hikes to Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda. The Japanese yen weakened 0.79 per cent against the greenback to 155.89 per dollar.
The dollar weakened 0.1 per cent against the Swiss franc at 0.774. The euro was down 0.1 per cent at $1.1772 against the dollar.
Sterling was flat at $1.3488.
Brent crude settled down 1 per cent at $70.77 per barrel, while tensions continued to simmer between the U.S. and Iran. Safe-haven gold dropped 0.1 per cent at $5,142 an ounce.
