4 Vijay Kedia stocks crash up to 20% on fears of AI-led disruption – News Air Insight

Shares of four companies backed by ace investor Vijay Kedia came under sharp selling pressure on Tuesday, with stocks plunging as much as 20%, as investors weighed the potential impact of artificial intelligence startup Anthropic‘s new security tool on the industry. Anthropic’s new feature, Claude Code Security, is designed to detect high-severity vulnerabilities in open-source software repositories and provide patches to fix bugs.

Among the worst hit was TAC Infosec, where Kedia holds a 9.58% stake, or over 20 lakh shares. The stock hit a 20% lower circuit at Rs 415.70 on the National Stock Exchange of India. TechD Cybersecurity dropped more than 14%, where Kedia owns a 5.26% stake, or nearly 3.93 lakh shares. Sattrix Information Security fell 5%, with Kedia holding an 8.06% stake, equivalent to 9.14 lakh shares, while Exato Technologies slipped 3%, where he owns a 3.48% stake, or about 3.50 lakh shares.

Anthropic’s new feature, Claude Code Security, is designed to detect high-severity vulnerabilities ‌in open-source ⁠software repositories ⁠and offer patches to fix bugs. As per the latest shareholding pattern on the exchanges, Kedia, a market veteran, holds a 9.58% stake or over 20 lakh shares of the company.

In the US, shares of CrowdStrike, Datadog and Zscaler fell around 11%, while those of Fortinet and Okta were down roughly 6%. Palo Alto Networks dropped 3% and SentinelOne was down by 5%.

Anthropic said its Claude Code tool can be used to modernize legacy systems that run on COBOL. Anthropic on Monday said Claude Code could automate much of the exploration and analysis that drives the complexity of COBOL modernization — a key business area for IBM. IBM has long sold mainframe systems optimized for large-scale transaction processing, where COBOL is widely used.

Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL is a dominant programming system developed in the late 1950s and is commonly used in business data processing, including payment processing and retail transaction systems. According to Anthropic, an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. still rely on COBOL, making it a potential target for cost-efficient AI disruption.

“Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government. Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year,” Anthropic said in its latest blog post.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)