AI Triggers $1T Software Rout: Opus 4.6 Launch, Big Tech's $500B AI CapEx Race & OpenAI Frontier | February 6, 2026

Daily AI Blog

February 6, 2026

📋 Quick Takeaways

AI-driven selloff erases ~$1 trillion from software stocks in seven days as investors fear AI will displace enterprise software business models
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.6 with 1M token context window, agent teams, and state-of-the-art benchmarks — outperforming GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro
Alphabet reveals $175B–$185B AI capex plan for 2026 — nearly double its 2025 spend — while reporting record Q4 revenue of $113.8B
Amazon announces $200B in 2026 AI spending, sending shares plunging ~10% after hours despite AWS growth reacceleration
OpenAI launches “Frontier”, an enterprise AI agent orchestration platform positioned as a “Semantic Operating System”
$405M+ in AI startup funding announced on February 5 alone, including Goodfire ($150M) and Fundamental ($255M)
Waymo closes $16B round at $126B valuation, planning expansion to 20+ new cities including Tokyo and London

📉 AI Market Shockwave

AI-Triggered Software Stock Rout Wipes ~$1 Trillion in Seven Days

The AI industry’s most disruptive week of 2026 saw nearly $1 trillion erased from software stocks as investors rapidly repriced the sector’s future in an AI-dominated world. The S&P 500 fell 1.2% and the Nasdaq shed 1.5% on February 5 alone, extending a brutal multi-day selloff.

Scale of the Damage:

The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund has plummeted approximately 20% year-to-date in 2026, including a 6.5% drop in the first week of February
HubSpot has fallen 39% this year, Figma has plunged 40%, Atlassian is down 35%, and Shopify has dropped 29%
Thomson Reuters and LegalZoom each fell more than 15% in a single session; RELX and FactSet also saw double-digit drops
Salesforce and ServiceNow have both lost about a quarter of their value in 2026

Catalyst: The selloff was triggered by Anthropic’s Claude Cowork productivity tool releasing new legal, finance, and product marketing plugins under an open-source license, enabling enterprise customization. Investors now fear that AI-native tools can increasingly replace established SaaS products across verticals — from legal research to financial analysis to CRM.

Analyst Perspective: Bank of America pushed back strongly, calling the selloff “internally inconsistent.” BofA analyst Vivek Arya argued that investors are simultaneously pricing in two mutually exclusive scenarios: that AI capex will deteriorate with weak ROI, while simultaneously being so pervasive that it renders all existing software obsolete. BofA compared the panic to the “overblown” DeepSeek selloff of January 2025.

Sources: Yahoo Finance | CNBC | Fortune | ABC News

🚀 Frontier Model Launch

Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 — 1M Context, Agent Teams, and State-of-the-Art Benchmarks

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 on February 5, its most capable model to date, marking a strategic pivot from coding-focused AI toward a comprehensive enterprise knowledge-work platform.

Key Technical Advances:

1M token context window (beta) — up from 200K, with 128K output token support
Agent Teams — multiple AI agents split large tasks into parallel subtasks, coordinating directly with each other
Adaptive Thinking — the model picks up on contextual clues to automatically calibrate reasoning depth
Compaction — enables context summarization for longer-running agentic tasks
PowerPoint Integration — research preview allowing Claude to read layouts, fonts, and templates to generate on-brand slides

Benchmark Performance:

ARC AGI 2: 68.8% (vs. 37.6% for Opus 4.5, 54.2% for GPT-5.2, 45.1% for Gemini 3 Pro)
Terminal-Bench 2.0: Highest score for agentic coding and system tasks
BrowseComp: Top score for multi-step agentic search
Humanity’s Last Exam: Leads all frontier models on multidisciplinary reasoning
GDPval-AA: Outperforms GPT-5.2 by ~144 Elo points on economically valuable knowledge-work tasks
MRCR v2 (8-needle, 1M): 76% accuracy vs. 18.5% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 on long-context retrieval

Enterprise Impact: Anthropic’s head of product, Scott White, described the shift as entering a “vibe working” era — where AI handles end-to-end knowledge work rather than just answering questions. The model is available on claude.ai, the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, and GitHub Copilot on launch day. Pricing remains $5/$25 per million input/output tokens.

🏗️ Big Tech AI CapEx Arms Race

Alphabet Reports Record Q4 Revenue, Stuns with $175B–$185B AI Spending Plan

Alphabet reported Q4 2025 earnings on February 4 that beat Wall Street on every major metric — yet shocked investors with the scale of its 2026 AI infrastructure commitment.

Q4 Financial Highlights:

Revenue: $113.8B (+18% YoY), beating the $111.4B consensus estimate
EPS: $2.82, up 31% from $2.15 a year ago, above the $2.63 estimate
Google Cloud: $17.7B (+48% YoY), exceeding the $16.2B estimate
Net income: $34.5B, up 30% YoY
YouTube ad + subscription revenue exceeded $60B for the full year 2025

The CapEx Bombshell: Alphabet’s 2026 capital expenditure guidance of $175B–$185B is roughly double the $91.4B spent in 2025, and far above the ~$120B Wall Street analysts had expected. CFO Anat Ashkenazi said roughly 60% goes to servers and 40% to data centers and networking, with just over half of ML compute allocated to the Cloud business.

AI Milestones: CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted that the Gemini app now has over 750 million monthly active users and that Google’s AI models process over 10 billion tokens per minute via direct API usage. Alphabet also disclosed Waymo’s $16B investment round.

Sources: CNBC | Yahoo Finance | Quartz | Google Blog

Amazon Plans $200B AI Spending Surge — Stock Plunges ~10% After Hours

Amazon reported Q4 2025 results on February 5 that beat on revenue but missed on EPS, while unveiling the largest AI spending plan of any company in history.

Q4 Financial Highlights:

Revenue: $213.4B (+14% YoY), slightly above the $211.3B estimate
EPS: $1.95, missing the $1.97 consensus by a penny
AWS Revenue: $35.6B (+24% YoY), the fastest growth in 13 quarters
Advertising: $21.3B, slightly above estimates

The $200B Plan: Amazon projected 2026 capex of approximately $200 billion — a massive jump from the $125B spent in 2025 and far above the $146.6B analysts expected. CEO Andy Jassy cited “seminal opportunities” in AI, chips, robotics, and low-earth orbit satellites. The Q1 operating income guide of $16.5B–$21.5B also fell below the $22.2B Street estimate.

Context: Amazon shares tumbled 4% during Thursday’s session and another 7%+ after hours. The company has also recently announced 16,000 corporate layoffs as it restructures for AI-era efficiency, bringing its four-month cut total to 30,000 positions.

Sources: CNBC | Bloomberg | Yahoo Finance | Deadline

🤖 Enterprise AI Platforms

OpenAI Launches “Frontier” — AI Agent Platform Targeting Enterprise Software

OpenAI officially launched “Frontier” on February 5, positioning the product as a “Semantic Operating System” designed to act as an autonomous orchestration layer that connects, manages, and executes workflows across an organization’s entire software stack. Industry analysts described the launch as a potential “extinction event” for traditional enterprise middleware.

Platform Vision: Rather than a chat-based assistant, Frontier integrates with legacy systems to eliminate manual data entry and cross-platform synchronization — the “glue work” that drives enterprise software complexity. The launch follows Anthropic’s own enterprise push with Cowork and marks an intensifying battle between AI labs for enterprise market share.

Sources: Fortune

Okta Warns of Critical “Authorization Gap” in AI Agent Security

Okta flagged a significant security vulnerability affecting AI agents deployed in enterprise collaborative environments. The risk: AI agents may retrieve data using a highly privileged user’s permissions, then post results to shared channels or workspaces where other recipients lack authorization to see that data.

Why It Matters: With 91% of organizations already utilizing AI agents according to Okta’s research, but only 10% having a well-developed strategy for managing non-human identities, this authorization gap represents a major blind spot in enterprise security as agentic AI adoption accelerates.

Sources: Tech Startups | Okta Blog

💰 Major AI Funding Rounds

Goodfire Raises $150M at $1.25B Valuation for AI Interpretability

AI interpretability lab Goodfire announced a $150 million Series B on February 5, led by B Capital with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Eric Schmidt, DFJ Growth, Menlo Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company is now valued at $1.25 billion.

Why It Matters: Goodfire builds tools to understand how AI models make decisions — an increasingly critical capability as frontier models are deployed in high-stakes domains. The company recently identified a novel class of Alzheimer’s biomarkers by reverse-engineering a foundation model built by partner Prima Mente, marking the first major scientific finding obtained through AI interpretability techniques. Goodfire has also demonstrated the ability to reduce LLM hallucinations by 50% through its model-inspection platform.

Sources: Bloomberg | SiliconANGLE | PR Newswire | PYMNTS

Fundamental AI Launches with $255M Series A for Enterprise Tabular Data

Fundamental emerged from stealth on February 5 with a $255 million Series A at a $1.2 billion valuation — one of the largest Series A rounds in AI history. The round was led by Oak HC/FT with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Hetz Ventures. Notable angels include Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras.

The Product: Fundamental builds a new deterministic AI architecture optimized specifically for analyzing massive volumes of structured and tabular data — a critical enterprise use case that general-purpose LLMs handle poorly. The company targets finance, healthcare, and enterprise operations where data accuracy is paramount.

Sources: Tech Startups

Lawhive Raises $60M to Scale AI-Human Hybrid Legal Services

UK-based legal AI startup Lawhive closed a $60 million Series B on February 5, led by Mitch Rales with participation from GV (Google Ventures), Balderton Capital, and TQ Ventures, bringing total funding to $100 million. The startup offers hybrid AI-human legal services in the U.S. market — landing at the epicenter of the AI-vs-SaaS disruption narrative that dominated the week.

Sources: Tech Startups

🚕 Autonomous Driving

Waymo Closes $16B Round at $126B Valuation — Plans 20+ New Cities

Alphabet’s autonomous driving unit Waymo announced its $16 billion funding round, now valuing the company at $126 billion — nearly triple the $45 billion from its October 2024 round. Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital led the round, with significant participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Mubadala Capital, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity. Alphabet provided roughly $13 billion of the total.

Operational Scale: Waymo now provides over 400,000 rides per week across six U.S. metro areas, more than tripling its annual volume to 15 million rides in 2025 (surpassing 20 million lifetime rides). The company plans to expand to 20+ additional cities in 2026, including international launches in Tokyo and London.

Safety Scrutiny: The expansion comes alongside increased regulatory attention — NHTSA and NTSB have opened investigations into incidents involving Waymo vehicles, including a January collision with a child near a school.

Sources: TechCrunch | Waymo Blog | Fortune

📊 Market Impact Analysis

The events of February 5–6, 2026 represent a potential inflection point in how markets value the AI era. Several converging forces are reshaping the industry in real time:

The New Winners-and-Losers Paradigm: The market has decisively shifted from “every tech stock benefits from AI” to a brutal sorting mechanism. AI infrastructure companies and frontier model developers are the perceived winners; traditional SaaS and enterprise software firms are being treated as potential casualties. Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid noted the market has moved to “a true winners and losers landscape.”

The $500B+ CapEx Question: Alphabet ($175B–$185B), Amazon ($200B), Meta ($115B–$135B), and Microsoft collectively plan over $500 billion in AI infrastructure spending for 2026. This is unprecedented capital deployment at nation-state scale — and investors are split on whether it represents visionary investment or reckless spending.

Enterprise AI Goes Head-to-Head with SaaS: Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 + Cowork, OpenAI’s Frontier platform, and Google’s expanding AI agent ecosystem are all converging on the same target: replacing or subsuming traditional enterprise software workflows. The simultaneous multi-front assault explains the breadth of the software selloff.

AI Interpretability Becomes Critical Infrastructure: Goodfire’s $150M raise at unicorn valuation signals that understanding how AI models work is no longer a research curiosity — it’s a commercial necessity as enterprises deploy autonomous agents in regulated, high-stakes environments.

Funding Concentration Accelerates: $405M+ raised by just two AI startups in a single day (Goodfire and Fundamental), while Waymo’s $16B round values a single AI application at $126B. Capital is consolidating around proven AI business models with clear paths to revenue.

🔮 Looking Ahead

Key Trends to Watch:

Whether the software stock selloff finds a floor or accelerates as more AI enterprise tools ship
How Big Tech’s combined $500B+ CapEx translates into actual revenue and margin impact through 2026
Adoption velocity of Claude Opus 4.6’s agent teams and OpenAI Frontier in enterprise environments
Regulatory responses to AI-driven workforce displacement as layoff announcements accelerate
AI interpretability and agent security becoming procurement requirements for enterprise buyers

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Last Updated: February 6, 2026, 9:30 AM CST