By Stephen Alpher
Publication Date: 2026-02-23 20:18:00
The seemingly daily disruption of business models by advances in artificial intelligence continued Monday, sending stock market averages and crypto prices sharply lower.
Today’s victim (in addition to the usual ones) was IBM, after Anthropic said Claude code can automate COBOL modernization.
“COBOL [Common Business-Oriented Language] is everywhere,” said Anthropic. “It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S.. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government.”
“The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them,” the company continued. “We aren’t exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter.”
“Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows,” Anthropic continued. “Tools like…
