[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] U.S. software shares have swung sharply this week on worries that artificial intelligence could erode the value of existing software products. CNBC reported on Aug. 7 that the so-called “Saaspocalypse” debate intensified again as a cut-price sale of Airtable coincided with sharp post-earnings share drops at HubSpot, Datadog and Figma.

The anxiety stood out in the Airtable sale deal. Italian software acquirer Bending Spoons agreed to buy workflow-management startup Airtable for less than $1.3 billion. Airtable was valued at about $12 billion at its peak in 2021.

Listed software shares also tumbled. HubSpot fell 19 percent two days after its earnings release, its worst drop in 10 years. Its cumulative decline over the past year has exceeded 50 percent. Datadog also slid 19 percent on Aug. 7, its biggest drop since its 2019 listing. Datadog said its largest AI customer has reduced usage since June, and analysts estimate the customer is OpenAI. Datadog shares are still up 72 percent so far this year.

On Wall Street, a view is spreading that tools such as OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude Code could weaken software companies’ revenue models. Matt Hedberg at RBC Capital Markets sees companies building features directly with coding agents, which could pressure software renewal contracts.

He said that in the first quarter, investor sentiment was so bad that customers avoided even meeting with software companies.

The fallout is also spreading to the capital market. There have been no notable SaaS initial public offerings this year. Based on PitchBook tallies, AI companies accounted for 86 percent of the value of private-market deals in the first half of 2026.

Some shares have rebounded. Twilio and Atlassian rose more than 20 percent each on Aug. 8 after releasing quarterly results, and Cloudflare gained 5.6 percent. Atlassian posted its highest profitability since 2021, and its shares jumped 35 percent in a day, the biggest rise since its 2015 listing.

Box CEO Aaron Levie (에런 레비) wrote on X that Atlassian’s quarterly results beat market expectations by a wide margin, adding that agents may be a negative for some software areas over the past six months but many investors have misread it. Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes (마이크 캐넌-브룩스) said the company’s research and development organisation worked to deliver customers the best quality, price and speed.

Salesforce is also under pressure. CEO Marc Benioff (마크 베니오프) has been persuading investors that traditional sales, marketing and customer service software will not be replaced by AI coding. But Salesforce’s enterprise value has fallen more than 40 percent since late 2024. RBC’s Rishi Jaluria (리시 잘루리아) said short covering by short sellers may have contributed in part to Atlassian’s surge, adding that a short squeeze can emerge when a company the market viewed as finished shows a contrary signal.