By The Tech Buzz Team
Publication Date: 2026-02-23 20:20:00
IBM is bleeding value today, with shares plummeting 11% as investors wake up to an existential threat from an unexpected source. Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, is apparently making moves into COBOL and legacy systems territory – IBM’s bread-and-butter mainframe business that’s kept the 112-year-old tech giant afloat. The market’s reaction is brutal and immediate, wiping billions off IBM’s market cap as Wall Street realizes AI might finally kill off the last profitable corner of Big Blue’s empire.
IBM is having a nightmare Monday. Shares of the century-old tech giant are down 11% after reports emerged that Anthropic is positioning itself to disrupt one of IBM’s most profitable franchises – the COBOL programming language and mainframe systems that still run much of the world’s critical business infrastructure.
The market’s reaction tells you everything about how vulnerable IBM’s core business has become. COBOL, that ancient programming language your parents’ generation…
