The Financial Post reports in its Tuesday edition that widespread investor fears that artificial intelligence could upend businesses is ripping through industries from software to financial services to logistics and real estate. The Post's Yvonne Lau writes that the so-called AI scare trade began in early February when AI giant Anthropic PBC released improvements to its AI agent called Claude Cowork, sparking an enterprise software rout that included Thomson Reuters and Shopify. The S&P North America Technology Software Index has plunged nearly 21 per cent this year. A series of new releases of AI tools unveiled by smaller start-ups, such as an AI tax chatbot, further amplified investor worries about how the emerging tech might devour white-collar jobs across industries, hitting wealth managers, insurers and even trucking companies. Canada's biggest names in software have suffered a bruising sell-off in recent weeks, which is indicative of "fast money" sloshing around, according to Craig Basinger at Purpose Investments. "When the fast money starts moving in one direction, it can certainly keep going, as software is showing us today," he said. Many observers say Shopify and Thomson Reuters's sell-off is way overdone.