Anthropic’s claim that AI can quickly refactor COBOL rattles IBM investors

Krishna further pointed out that the increase in revenue from its Z line could be attributed to the efficiency of the Watson Code Assistant in modernizing COBOL applications, in turn making it easy for enterprise development teams to run the mainframes.

Moreover, IBM, in response to Anthropic’s assertions and to allay investors’ fears, put out a blog post of its own arguing that translating COBOL code is not equivalent to modernizing the underlying systems in a mainframe.

“Translation captures almost none of the actual complexity. The modernization challenge is not a COBOL language problem. It is everything the application runs on and integrates with,” Rob Thomas, SVP of IBM software, wrote in the post.