By Supriyo Bose
Publication Date: 2026-03-02 14:29:00
International Business Machines Corporation IBM stock plummeted 20.6% over the past three months, lagging the industry’s 12.8% growth due to a sudden development in artificial intelligence (AI) that could threaten its core legacy businesses. The plunge was primarily triggered by an announcement from AI firm Anthropic that its Claude Code tool can modernize legacy COBOL systems — a foundational programming language deeply embedded in IBM’s mainframe ecosystem.
With Claude Code proposing to substantially automate code exploration, documentation, refactoring and security analysis, it threatened to reduce enterprises’ reliance on specialized legacy service providers like IBM, bringing its sustenance at stake. This is likely to redefine the competitive landscape, leading to a broad-based downslide across the sector. Peers like Microsoft Corporation MSFT and Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN declined 17.8% and 9.6%, respectively, over this period.
Three-Month IBM Stock Price…
