London, April 24, 2026, 12:05 BST
- RELX reaffirmed its 2026 outlook after what it called a strong start across all four business areas.
- The company opened a new £350 million buyback tranche running from April 23 to May 22.
- Legal AI competition remains the pressure point after Anthropic and Freshfields announced a new tie-up on Thursday.
RELX PLC held its full-year guidance and launched a fresh £350 million share buyback, seeking to steady investors after a volatile stretch for legal and data stocks hit by fears that artificial intelligence could unsettle parts of their business.
The timing matters. The London-listed information and analytics group is telling shareholders that its own AI-enabled products are lifting sales, while investors are still testing whether newer AI tools can chip away at the value of proprietary legal, risk and research data.
That debate sharpened again on Thursday, when Anthropic and law firm Freshfields said they would jointly develop AI tools for legal research, drafting, contract review and internal workflows. Thomson Reuters Chief Technology Officer Joel Hron told Reuters the market was moving from AI trials to “embedding it into day-to-day workflows at scale.” Reuters
RELX shares were down 0.45% at 2,671/2,672 pence in delayed AJ Bell data on Friday, after closing at 2,684 pence on Thursday. AJ Bell listed the company’s market value at £47.59 billion.
RELX said it had started the year well in Risk, Scientific, Technical & Medical, Legal and Exhibitions, with strong underlying revenue and profit growth and strong new sales. Underlying growth strips out items such as currency moves, acquisitions, disposals, print-related revenue and certain exhibition timing effects, giving investors a cleaner view of trading.
The company kept its forecast for strong underlying revenue and adjusted operating profit growth in 2026, and strong adjusted earnings-per-share growth on a constant-currency basis. Constant currency means results are measured without the effect of exchange-rate swings.
In Legal, RELX said double-digit growth continued in law firms and corporate legal, driven by adoption of Lexis+ with Protégé, its AI-enabled research and analytics platform with an “agentic” legal assistant. Agentic software can take on tasks with more autonomy than a standard chatbot, though still inside a controlled product. Relx
Morningstar analyst Rob Hales wrote that RELX gave “no first-quarter numbers” and made “no changes to guidance wording.” He kept Morningstar’s fair value estimate at 4,200 pence and said the shares looked “deeply undervalued,” while noting the stock had been caught in the AI-disruption selloff in information services. Morningstar
The buyback is part of a larger £2.25 billion repurchase plan for 2026. A U.S. filing showed the new £350 million programme follows another £350 million tranche completed on April 22, and will be managed by J.P. Morgan Securities plc independently of RELX; shares bought back are intended to be held in treasury, meaning they are retained by the company rather than left in public circulation.
The capital return is larger than last year’s. RELX said in February it deployed £1.5 billion on buybacks in 2025, reported revenue of £9.59 billion and adjusted operating profit of £3.34 billion, and said it intended to deploy £2.25 billion on buybacks in 2026. Chief Executive Erik Engstrom said then that AI was helping RELX add functionality and launch products faster.
The competitive backdrop is not just Anthropic. Thomson Reuters, owner of Westlaw, and Wolters Kluwer also sell legal information and workflow tools, and Reuters reported in February that shares in those companies and RELX fell sharply after Anthropic launched plug-ins aimed at legal and other professional tasks.
But the update left some room for caution. RELX did not publish first-quarter numbers, the Exhibitions unit flagged some event rescheduling in the Middle East, and the company’s own risk language pointed to data-use regulation, intellectual-property changes, cyber threats, geopolitical conditions and competition as factors that could alter outcomes.
For now, RELX is asking the market to treat AI as a product driver, not just a threat. The next test is whether strong sales in Legal, Risk and scientific research tools can keep offsetting investor doubts about how quickly professional customers may shift work to newer AI platforms.
