They say they're not afraid, but their filings tell the truth: This year, 27 SaaS companies have listed AI agents as a competitive risk in their SEC filings.

According to 1M AI News, 27 software companies have listed AI agents as a competitive risk factor in their securities filings this year, compared to only 7 in the same period last year. However, executives at these companies generally downplayed this threat during earnings calls, creating a stark contrast between the filing wording and public statements. Figma, a design tool, stated in its 10-K filing last month that agency AI "could change how people access and use digital products, thereby reducing reliance on traditional software applications." However, during its earnings call that same day, CEO Dylan Field stated that "humans will continue to use software, and so will agents," adding, "If you're willing to entrust critical tasks to agents to perform unsupervised tasks right now, you're a very brave person." Figma's current stock price is below its IPO price last year. HubSpot, a customer relationship management platform, directly mentioned in its February annual report that customers can use AI to build their own CRM tools, even specifically mentioning "vibe coding" (natural language programming) as a potential alternative. The company's stock price has fallen by nearly half in the past six months. Workday, an enterprise human resources platform, acknowledged in its 10-K filing in early March that it might face challenges in "maintaining market differentiation" and warned that its newly launched Flex Credits (a pay-as-you-go billing model for agents) "may encounter customer resistance." Former CEO Carl Eschenbach, who said in January that "AI is a tailwind for us, definitely not a headwind," stepped down last month. Adobe's January annual report also stated that it faces "increasingly intense competition from companies offering generative and agentic AI solutions," but outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen still claimed last week that the company's products are "uniquely designed" to meet the needs of enterprises in the AI agent era. Adobe's stock price has fallen 28% this year. This wave of panic has been dubbed "SaaSpocalypse" by investors. After Anthropic released its new Claude agent tool in February, the software sector lost approximately $850 billion in market capitalization within days. Since 2005, the SEC has mandated that listed companies disclose significant risk factors in their filings. This mechanism objectively allows management to make more optimistic predictions in public, while the filings themselves serve as a risk disclosure obligation.