The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday edition that Wall Street ended sharply lower on Tuesday as investors worried about artificial intelligence creating more competition for software makers. A Reuters dispatch to The Globe says the Toronto Stock Exchange, by contrast, ended higher, finding support from a rally in precious metals stocks. Investors in recent months have become pickier about AI-related stocks, looking for companies generating measurable returns from their outsized investments in the new technology Wall Street's attention on Tuesday turned to technology companies that could face steeper competition and lower margins as a result of AI. One catalyst driving those concerns was Anthropic's launch of a legal tool for its Claude AI chatbot. Salesforce, Datadog and Adobe lost about 7 per cent, Synopsys and Atlassian fell about 8 per cent and Intuit slumped 11 per cent. Shares of Thomson Reuters, which is set to report its fourth quarter earnings results on Thursday and sells legal software, tumbled nearly 16 per cent. The S&P/TSX Composite Index ended up 204.72 points at 32,388.60. The price of oil climbed, settling at $63.21 (U.S.) a barrel, helping to give the energy group a 1.9-per-cent boost.