LPL finally stops (largely) Anthropic-fueled stock price skid by confirming 'something big' -- with Anthropic -- a new Morningstar report pounding the table to buy LPL shares didn't hurt

LPL Financial needed a lifeline after an Anthropic-related scare sent its shares on a two-week, $90 skid – and it found one… from Anthropic, whose sales head threw LPL a bone on LinkedIn.

The Fort Mill, S.C., broker-dealer giant earned mentions from two staffers at Anthropic who confirmed that LPL is poised to capitalize on gains it has made specifically tied to wealth management.

It was a relief.

LPL shares closed at $393.25 on Feb. 9, then plummeted almost every trading thereafter, closing at $303.80 yesterday (Feb. 23), a loss of about 23% and $6 billion of market capitalization.

LPL issued a statement that both assured it was neither asleep at the AI switch, nor is AI a big threat to its chief asset – its 30,000 financial advisors. It also clarified that Anthropic is not its exclusive AI partner.

It read in part:

“LPL has been intentionally building advisor‑centric AI for years. …We know that our advisors’ clients want a person they trust, someone who understands their goals, fears, and values. With partners like Anthropic, we’re shaping the next generation of AI that helps inform decisions all while our advisors guide their clients in making them.”

Something big

LPL earned words from both Jonathan Pelosi, enterprise sales leader at Anthropic, and Peter Nolan, head of Asset & Wealth Management at Anthropic.

“I’m excited to share that LPL Financial is expanding its partnership with Anthropic," Nolan wrote. "… This is the beginning of something big for financial advisors and their clients.”

The “something big” is making artificial intelligence work in the mission-critical area of not only completing tasks but doing so compliantly.

Pelosi added: “Financial service firms are tackling one of AI’s hardest tests with regulated, high-stakes, and trust-dependent work. It's also where the impact will be most profound.”

Anthropic, which makes artifical intelligence (AI) tools, triggered a significant selloff in software-as-a-service (SaaS) legal and financial technology stocks following the release of new "agentic" AI products.

Orion, which administers $5.8 trillion of advisor assets, also put out a release today alerting the industry that it is also ensconced with Anthropic.

“Orion has been working with Anthropic and other AI platforms,” says Reed Colley, President of Orion Advisor Technology, by email. “We have also built and released skills like those announced by Anthropic today and the timing of our announcement reflects our collaboration and Orion’s ability to harness the latest AI changes on behalf of our advisors.”

Mad buying

The fact that LPL and Anthropic declined to elaborate about what the two firms can accomplish together did not deter investors from madly buying the beaten-down shares.

LPL's stock jumped $4.82 or 1.59% during regular trading hours today (Feb. 24) to close at $308.70 and finished after-hours at $311.48.

LPL may have gotten an even bigger boost from Morningstar, which raised its target price to $540 from $504, seeing little threat from AI but also the potential for a big boost.

“The firm's rollout of higher-touch services like estate planning and tax management, in tandem with a broader suite of investment options, could allow LPL to compete ably for high-net-worth clients and their advisors,” the report reads without mentioning AI this context. 

Plug and play

The LPL-Anthropic collaboration coincided with a broader rollout by Anthropic, Bloomberg reported.

“During a livestreamed event on Tuesday, Anthropic said it’s also letting business customers customize plug-ins to suit the standards of their organizations,” it reported today. 

“A large share of Anthropic’s new customization offerings target the finance industry, with new plugins tailored for financial analysis, equity research, private equity and wealth management.”

It also came two weeks after Claude was crowned the best AI product.

“Anthropic specifically trained Opus 4.6 to plan more carefully, sustain agentic tasks for longer, work more reliably inside large real-world codebases and catch its own mistakes during debugging and code review.,” says a reviewer in Tom's Guide. “These improvements are what turned the AI into a chatbot that actually behaves like a junior engineer or analyst.”

Notably, Claude Cowork and Claude Code are reportedly capable of writing, testing, and fixing production-grade code, as well as reviewing legal documents and analyzing data with minimal human input, according to the company. 

Disruptive innovation

 Altruist touched off a similar run on wealth management stocks on Feb. 10 when it put out a press release to tout it's AI brand, "Hazel."

The tax planning tool triggered investor fears that AI tools would prove to be a disruptive innovation for the wealth management industry. 

Hazel can essentially accomplish in minutes, and for pennies, what a private bank's ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) wealth management team might takes weeks to do at great expense, according to the company.

'[Hazel] helps advisors create fully personalized tax strategies for clients by reading and interpreting their 1040s, paystubs, account statements, meeting notes, emails, and custodial and CRM data, and applying deep tax logic to the analysis," it said. “All of this is done within minutes.”

Common thread

Altruist Founder and CEO Jason Wenk later revealed that much of the AI muscle behind Hazel is provided by Anthropic. It also uses OpenAI and [Google] Gemini.

Wenk added by text that merely partnering with Anthropic can only accomplish so much.

“Sounds like damage control,” he says. “If your infrastructure is bad, there is no amount of AI you can layer on top of it to make it good.”

Nor is a relationship with Anthropic a high bar," Wenk says, explaining it is not unlike using AWS for site hosting.

“Altruist and pretty much every company I know has a relationship with Anthropic.”