Anthropic’s Plugin Drop Lifts Stocks — but Tariff Jitters Stick around

The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Market Watch, Investor’s Business Daily, and Reuters contributed to this report.

Wall Street closed a little greener Tuesday after the AI lab rolled out a slate of business plug-ins — enough to nudge tech names higher even as trade worries from Washington kept investors on edge. The Dow climbed 0.59%, the S&P 500 ticked up 0.28%, and the Nasdaq gained 0.50% (to 49,093.35, 6,857.06 and 22,741.33, respectively).

Anthropic said its new tools let customers bolt its models into workflows alongside partners such as Thomson Reuters, Salesforce and FactSet — and those partners saw the bump: FactSet jumped 3.8%, the US listing of Thomson Reuters popped 8.8%, and Salesforce added 3.4%. The lab’s latest release comes after earlier AI announcements that helped trigger a selloff in traditional software names.

Chip news drove one of the day’s biggest winners. Advanced Micro Devices surged 6.7% after sealing what it called up to $60 billion in AI-chip sales to Meta Platforms over five years. That deal was the kind of demand signal investors like to see — especially before a busy earnings stretch.

Retail and test-equipment stocks also helped: Home Depot rose 2.7% after reaffirming its annual guidance, and Keysight Technologies leapt about 20.5% on an upbeat Q2 profit outlook. Tech giant Apple led big-cap gains with roughly a 3% jump. By contrast, Alphabet and Nvidia each slipped about 1%; the latter’s quarterly results, due after Wednesday’s close, are keeping traders cautious.

The rally was a partial recovery: software stocks remain under pressure this month, and the S&P 500’s software and services index is still nursing heavy losses for the year. Traders warned that Tuesday’s optimism could be fragile — there are several moving parts. One is political: President Donald Trump’s shifting talk on tariffs has injected dose of uncertainty. After a Friday ruling, the White House put a 10% global tariff in place Tuesday, and the president later signaled it could rise to 15%, though timing and scope remain unclear.

Another drag on sentiment was a bearish note from Citrini Research that sketched a grim AI-driven downside scenario — a report some traders cited as amplifying Monday’s selloff. Add those macro and geopolitical doubts to ongoing AI-disruption debates, and you get the list of worries Peter Cardillo and other market hands keep citing: geopolitics, policy, and the pace at which automation actually translates into real-world demand.

Market internals were positive: advancers outnumbered decliners by roughly 1.34-to-1 on the NYSE and 1.65-to-1 on the Nasdaq. The S&P posted 27 new 52-week highs and 11 lows; the Nasdaq logged 60 highs and 117 lows — a reminder that even in a slim rally, the tape is uneven.

Bottom line: investors bought the AI plugin news and some solid corporate updates, but the mood is cautious. Good headlines for now — AMD’s mega-deal and steady guidance from retailers — but tariffs and lingering AI angst mean the rally could be a stopgap unless clarity arrives on trade policy and earnings.