The AI fear Bill Ackman thinks investors have got wrong
Key Points
- S&P Global fell more than 25% peak-to-trough in February 2026 after Anthropic launched Claude Cowork and the company issued weaker growth guidance.
- Pershing Square Holdings bought in, arguing the AI disruption fear targets a small part of the business.
- Capital IQ, the product investors focused on, makes up under 7% of S&P Global revenue.
- Over 80% of profits come from Ratings, Indices and Platts, which the fund says face next to no AI risk.
- Pershing Square expects earnings to grow in the low-to-mid teens, with buybacks cutting the share count 4% a year.
Pershing Square Holdings bought into S&P Global after the launch of an Anthropic AI product helped knock more than a quarter off the company’s share price.
The London-listed fund set out the trade in its interim report, published on Thursday (13 August).
S&P Global fell more than 25% from peak to trough in February 2026 following Anthropic’s launch of Claude Cowork, an AI tool built to carry out office work, and the company’s own 2026 growth guidance, which came in below the targets it set at an investor day the previous November.
The share price drop cut the company’s valuation from 25 times earnings to 19 times, its lowest in five years.
Investors sold on the view that AI would eat into the company’s data and analytics products, the report said. Pershing Square argues that the fear attaches to the wrong part of the business.
Capital IQ, the desktop product that drew most of the attention, accounts for under 7% of total revenue and a smaller share of profits, according to the fund’s analysis.
More than 80% of S&P Global’s profits come from three benchmark operations that Pershing Square rates as carrying next to no AI disruption risk. Ratings runs as an effective duopoly with Moody’s, with each firm rating over 95% of US corporate debt.
Indices draws more than 70% of its profits from ownership of the S&P 500 trademark, against which over $20 trillion of assets sit. Platts sets the pricing benchmarks used for around 70% of seaborne crude oil.
The counter-argument
AI increases demand for the kind of proprietary, structured data S&P Global sells, the fund said, because language models need high-quality inputs to work from.
The company has added MCP connectors, which plug its data directly into AI workflows. Pershing Square expects earnings to grow in the low-to-mid teens as a result, helped by a buyback programme reducing the share count by around 4% a year.
The position sits alongside five other purchases made this year, including Visa, Mastercard, Netflix, Intercontinental Exchange and Alcon. Pershing Square cited AI fears as a factor in the sell-off at Intercontinental Exchange as well.
The figures are the fund’s own estimates and the report states that actual results may differ materially from them.
