Why Apple, Anthropic Might Be the Real Winners of the AI Disruption Era

While software stocks were melting down yesterday, Apple quietly dropped something that might explain the chaos.

Xcode 26.3 now ships with full Claude Agent SDK integration, giving millions of iOS developers an autonomous AI copilot.

This means Claude can now work autonomously on long-running tasks: exploring your project’s file structure, understanding how SwiftUI and UIKit connect, then making changes across multiple files to achieve a goal. Give it a task, and it breaks it down, decides which files to modify, and iterates until done.

The killer feature? Visual verification. Claude can capture Xcode Previews to see what the interface looks like, identify issues, and fix them on its own. No constant human input required.

What else Claude can do in Xcode 26.3:

• Search Apple’s documentation and API guides directly
• Explore full file structures and understand project architecture
• Capture visual Previews and iterate on SwiftUI views
• Break down complex tasks and execute them autonomously

For terminal lovers, Xcode 26.3 also exposes its capabilities through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Claude Code CLI users can integrate with Xcode and capture Previews without leaving the command line.

OpenAI’s Codex is also getting integrated, but Anthropic got the press release love today. TechCrunch has the full breakdown.

But this story isn’t just YET ANOTHER coding tool news piece. It’s about where AI is headed… and who controls the interface layer.

Here’s what seems to have happened with the so-called ‘SaaSpocalypse’

Anthropic launched a new legal plugin as part of its larger plugin push, which can handle document review, compliance tracking, and NDA triage.

The response? A $285 billion rout across software, legal tech, and financial services stocks. Thomson Reuters down 16%. RELX (LexisNexis’s parent) down 15%. Etc etc.

“Trading is very much ‘get me out’ style selling,” Jeffrey Favuzza at Jefferies told Bloomberg. “The draconian view is that software will be the next print media or department stores.” Whoa.

Dramatic? Yes. Overblown? Analyst Mandeep Singh certainly thinks so. Although he did highlight the need for SaaS companies to change from a seat-based model to a consumption-based model… because if companies need less employees overall… you won’t grow revenue from adding more seats.

Now here’s the counter-narrative: Not everyone is doomed. And shockingly, Apple might be positioned perfectly to ride this wave. We think Dan Shipper put it well here:

“Hot take: Apple is going to be a big winner in AI. Native apps are naturally easier to vibe code, you only break things for individual users. Apple ecosystem connects to a bunch of extremely important data like health and messaging that makes AI better. Everyone’s buying a Mac mini for their agent… the TAM for their hardware is going up 100x.”

While OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and Google competed on model capabilities, Apple was building the integration layer. Their Siri 2.0 overhaul (coming this spring with iOS 26.4) will understand your personal context, access your messages, emails, and health data, and then, most importantly, use that context to take actions across apps.

The Google partnership gives Apple the model backbone to do this. Apple just provides the user experience and the privacy guarantees via their private cloud compute system.

Our take…

We’re bullish on Apple finally figuring this AI thing out in 2026. They’ve had years to tinker while others rushed to market. Now the models are good enough to deliver on their promises, and they control the hardware, the OS, and the ecosystem. And if Dan’s right that people will soon vibecode their own apps, the app store could become The Skills Store or The Agent Store or even The PlugIn Store that your agent accesses on your behalf.

As Aaron Levie of Box implied on TBPN, the “SaaSpocalypse” is really a question of who owns the interface layer, and how strong the network effects inherent in that interface are.

He and John Coogan workshopped the “perfect heuristic” to assess if your SaaS tool is AI-safe: if your customer can get the same value out of your tool with a fresh install that does the exact same thing, like “personal productivity [software] with no network effect with limited sort of data that’s aggregated, that’s a danger zone.”

So if Anthropic plugins (or skills, or subagents, or whatever form they ultimately take) can replace entire software categories, the most value migrates to whoever controls where those plugins live. Right now, that’s looking like Apple and Anthropic sitting in a tree…

Editor’s note: This content originally ran in the newsletter of our sister publication, The Neuron. To read more from The Neuron, sign up for its newsletter here.

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