Finsbury Growth & Income (FGT) has pared some of this week’s losses after fund manager Nick Train argued the market’s “panic” over Anthropic’s threat to his key data and software holdings was mis-placed.

Despite the big falls in his long-standing investments in London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), Sage, RELX, and newer holdings in Autotrader, Experian, and Rightmove, Train said they all had “a credible opportunity to bring AI-enhanced services to their customers, an opportunity based on their ownership of data assets that are not available to emerging large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Anthropic.”

Echoing the case put today by business software investor Hg, that incumbent companies had a headstart and should “mobilise” to use AI and not be destroyed by it, Train added: “This is not a fantasy. All these companies are innovating and, crucially, growing more quickly as a result of their successful innovations.”

Shares in data analytics provider RELX plunged 14% when Anthropic announced it had launched an AI-powered legal productivity tool for corporations. “Yet, by Anthropic’s own admission ‘AI-generated analysis should be reviewed by licensed attorneys before being relied on for legal decisions.’  Those licensed attorneys are highly likely to be customers of RELX today and need RELX’s trusted data as much as ever,” said Train.

Accounting software giant Sage (SGE) has fallen 11% this week and 18% year-to-date despite recently reporting good progress with its CoPilot and telling Train last month that AI represented “an extraordinary tailwind” for the company.

”We think that Sage’s deep domain expertise built on 40+ years of proprietary data gathering, accounting expertise and trust, as well as its ability to navigate complex regulatory environments, puts it in a strong position to leverage AI to improve its product offering and value proposition to its customers,” said the manager.

Experian (EXPN), the credit rater, has been another casualty of fears that AI tools are taking its business. Train dismissed the bear case against it as “speculative”, saying its latest results showed 9% growth in North America excluding mortgages, against a credit market that grew at just 1%. 

“This indicates that there is no cyclical tailwind to that growth – in fact Experian is becoming less reliant on credit volumes and is instead driven by the sale of increasingly sophisticated software products which are firmly embedded in their customers’ workflows,” products that Train said could be boosted by the application of AI.

FGT shares rallied 2.5% to 747p, reducing their decline this week to 3.6% although the manager remains under severe pressure with the portfolio down 21% over one year and after five successive years of underperformance against the FTSE All Share.