Anthropic’s new AI tool can write 67-year-old COBOL code, sending 115-year-old IBM’s stock tumbling by 13% — IBM stock has worst day in 26 years, down 25% MoM and counting

What do airlines, banks, and insurance companies have in common? Besides being an absolute pain to deal with, they all rely on COBOL and IBM mainframe computers as core infrastructure. The computing giant’s stranglehold over those markets may finally begin to crack, though. Anthropic has announced COBOL-specific functionality for its Claude AI bot, and IBM’s investors responded with a resounding 13% drop in stock prices.

Anthropic published its ideas in a blog post, and the company seems to know its target market quite well. There’s a Code Modernization Playbook available for download, and existing YouTube videos letting Claude Code loose on a COBOL illustrate the concept. Mixing “COBOL,” “AI bot,” and “YouTube” in the same sentence is utterly anathema to common logic… and yet here we are.