It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—and for the software industry, which has faced continual discussions about its survival in the era of AI, it was, well, just the times.

Anxiety about the fate of the traditional software industry has reawakened after a less-than-stellar week on the markets for publicly traded software companies, with investors questioning if AI can really disrupt a once-stable market.

Rough week. On Jan. 30, Anthropic unveiled new plugins for Claude Cowork, its desktop agent tool, which would help automate sales, legal, finance, and marketing functions.

The announcement sent Wall Street into a spiral. Shares of Thomson Reuters, ServiceNow, and Salesforce, among others, tumbled the following week. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reported, two S&P indexes that track the performance of software and tech stocks lost almost $300 billion in market value that same week.

Why SaaS fears are back.—BM

It isn’t just a tired developer’s imagination: the cost of some application programming interfaces (APIs) is rising. Experts suggest this price jump is mirroring other expenses related to AI. Is there anything software teams can do to rein in these costs?

Brad Cline, VP of IT business applications at SolarWinds, told IT Brew that as bigger tech companies expand their use of AI and build data centers “quicker than we can even find land, power, water, everything else needed,” they’re also trying to offset those enormous AI-related costs.

For example, Salesforce now charges more for API access, which could impact the cost of any apps that rely on Salesforce’s data. But it isn’t only Salesforce, according to Cline: Other cloud providers have increased API and data costs, too.

“[We’re] not looking forward to the next round of Salesforce [negotiations],” Cline said. “We’re in a contract right now, but recent contracts had 100% increase in some of our data egress and API connections, not necessarily Salesforce, but I’m expecting from them as well. So, 100% is obviously very impactful…You’re talking about a pretty monumental increase in your run rate.”

APIs aren’t the only thing costing IT pros more.—CN

Encryption is complicated, even for adversaries looking for the easiest way to ruin a CIO’s day.

Researchers are seeing ransomware actors abandon encryption for a method requiring less expertise: exfiltration-only.

Exfil ’er up! Exfil-only tactics include stealing a company’s sensitive data, posting victims’ names to a leak site, and threatening release of the information.

This method differs from encryption-based ransomware, in which attackers encrypt a target’s data, then demand money to unlock it.

A new report from insurer and security-platform provider At-Bay Security tracked a 450% increase in exfil-only offensives from Q3 to Q4 2025 (At-Bay declined to provide specific totals).

By eliminating encryption from their operational model, At-Bay said, threat groups no longer require sophisticated technical elements like a data locker and decrypter. This allows rookies to easily join the adversarial fold.

Why exfil-only tactics are on the rise.—BH

When a ransomware attack strikes, chaos follows—unless you’ve planned for it. Here’s what one CISO says separates resilient organizations from the rest.