Thomson Reuters chief executive Steve Hasker before the closing bell ceremony at Nasdaq MarketSite in New York in November, 2025.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Thomson Reuters Corp. TRI-T chief executive officer Steve Hasker said a plunge in the value of software and data providers this week “represents anxiety and not fundamentals,” adding in an interview that his company’s confidence in its AI strategy “and our position within the ecosystem is growing.”
The information software and news provider reaffirmed its financial targets for 2026 and reported a 5-per-cent rise in quarterly profit, signalling a bullish outlook for the year even after its share price dropped 18 per cent over three days as part of a broader sell-off of tech stocks.
This week, Thomson Reuters was one of several companies, particularly those that make legal software, that suffered when Anthropic released new AI-backed productivity tools for lawyers, feeding into investor uncertainty about who will be the winners and losers from AI.
Thomson Reuters is projecting its revenue will rise by 7.5 per cent to 8 per cent this year, after it reported nearly US$7.5-billion in revenue in 2025 and solid fourth-quarter results on Thursday.
Anthropic’s release of AI tools for lawyers prompts massive legal-tech sell-off
The company’s pushback against market jitters is rooted in its conviction that the vast troves of legal, tax and accounting content that it has amassed over decades, curated by a staff of more than 2,700 attorney editors and tax experts, will allow it to train better AI-based products than its newer competitors.
Most of those competitors are using AI to build new tools to help legal professionals with research, document drafting and other repeatable tasks that can be at least partly automated.
“Our bet is that we can take our content and our expertise and our leadership position in research and know-how and use that to drive a leadership position in the legal AI-driven workflows,” Mr. Hasker said Thursday. “And our bet is that others cannot come the other way.”
He said companies such as Anthropic are building tools that are good at automating general-purpose tasks, but unless they make the huge investments to buy content and acquire expert staff, they will struggle to replicate what Thomson Reuters offers.
At the same time, Thomson Reuters is spending heavily to build “agentic” AI tools – which can do complex tasks that have multiple steps with fewer prompts from human users – into its main line of products. The company spent more than US$200-million on AI upgrades in 2025 and expects to repeat that this year.
“For those professionals, principally lawyers and tax professionals, the stakes are remarkably high,” Mr. Hasker said. “They have to be correct.”
Woodbridge Co. Ltd., the Thomson family holding company and controlling shareholder of Thomson Reuters, also owns The Globe and Mail.
Thomson Reuters’s share price dropped 7.8 per cent to $117.92 by early afternoon on the Toronto Stock Exchange, after a brief reprieve on Wednesday. The stock has fallen 57 per cent over the past six months.
Even so, Scotia Capital Inc. analyst Maher Yaghi said he sees “positive momentum” for Thomson Reuters, in a note to clients.
“The info tech and broader software sector has been decimated by fears about AI,” Mr. Yaghi said, but “today’s results and outlook do not show any anticipated slowing down by management.”
Thomson Reuters’s fourth-quarter revenue was US$2-billion, a 7-per-cent increase year over year after excluding the impact of the sale of one of its businesses as well as currency effects.
The company’s three largest divisions serving legal and corporate as well as tax and accounting customers increased their revenue by 9 per cent. And the company’s share of revenue from contracts for products that are backed by AI increased to 28 per cent, from 24 per cent three months earlier.
Thomson Reuters reported fourth-quarter profit of US$332-million, or 74 US cents a share, compared with US$587-million, or US$1.30 a share, in the same quarter last year.
On an adjusted basis, which excludes gains from the sale of a business last year, Thomson Reuters said it earned US$1.07 a share. On average, analysts expected earnings per share of US$1.06.
The company increased its annualized dividend by 10 per cent to US$2.62 a share, and said it has US$11-billion of capital available to pursue acquisitions or return cash to shareholders.