By Simon Sharwood
Publication Date: 2026-02-23 23:53:00
IBM’s share price slumped by 13 percent on Monday, seemingly caused by investors reacting to an Anthropic blog post that points out its Claude Code tools can accelerate refactoring of apps written in the ancient COBOL language.
Anthropic’s post points out that COBOL applications remain prevalent and often handle critical applications for governments, airlines, and financial institutions. The AI upstart also noted that COBOL-proficient programmers are hard to find, that attempts to train more of them have not grown the population, and that migrating from COBOL is therefore risky and expensive.
And then, because vibe coding tool Claude Code is Anthropic’s hammer and any software development problem looks like a nail, the company suggested using AI to help rewrite COBOL apps.
“AI can assess which components are safe to move and which need careful handling,” Anthropic suggests. “Areas with accumulated…
