In the early hours of February 5, 2026, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, sending shockwaves from Silicon Valley to Manhattan. Software stocks plummeted despite strong earnings. Even Bitcoin tanked as investors fled to stable assets.

The Anthropic news signaled a broader threat: AI models are pushing into the application layer, destroying moats and forcing companies to rethink business models. If that feels familiar, that’s because we have been here before. In November 2022 ChatGPT made investors question even whether companies like Google had a future. In January 2025, China’s DeepSeek challenged the entire American approach to AI, which relied on costly cutting-edge hardware. The stocks of AI-powerhouses like NVIDIA took a…