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Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Monday, February 23rd. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street

Journal. The weeks-long sell-off

and software stocks deepen today amid general unease about the threat posed by AI. Software makers

Apploven, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Workday, Expedia, and Inuit were all among the S&P 500's worst

10 performers around midday, dropping at least 7%.

Rapid advancements in AI's ability to write code have spooked investors this year. Several of the day's

biggest decliners were discussed in a now viral Sunday night post from Citrini Research. The post

outlined a hypothetical scenario where AI profoundly impacts the economy in the

near future. Also taking a hit, shares in big banks and other financial services firms. Investors are

parsing through the possible impacts of AI on the payment processing fees that bring in billions of dollars to the industry every year.

American Express's stock was down

over 7% as of this afternoon, while J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley were all down 4% or more.

MasterCard was down roughly 6% and Visa was down about 4%. And Anthropic accused three Chinese AI companies of creating over 24,000 fraudulent accounts

to siphon data from its Claude model and improve their own products.

In a blog post today, Anthropic set the three companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Minimax,

prompted Claude more than 16 million times.

Representatives from the three Chinese companies didn't respond to requests for comment.

Anthropics said the alleged activity raises national security concerns regarding military and intelligence systems.

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