By Brian Sozzi
Publication Date: 2026-02-24 14:26:00
The AI scare trade is taking no prisoners.
And I mean no prisoners.
IBM (IBM) stock sold off to the tune of 13.5% on Monday after Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) renewed fears that AI code assistants could disrupt legacy COBOL (common business-oriented language) workloads.
Anthropic said in its new blog post that hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL remain in daily production across finance, airlines, and government. It argued that AI can now automate analysis tasks that historically made modernization slow and costly. COBOL has a starring role in mission-critical infrastructure, such as payments and financial systems, areas where IBM has been the leader for years.
Read more about IBM’s stock moves and today’s market action.
The market shot first and asked questions later on IBM, causing $31 billion in market value to go up in smoke. Shares are up only slightly on Tuesday.
Here’s what I am hearing the day after the IBM rout.
“IBM has been investing in code…