IBM stock suffers worst single-day drop in 25 years over Anthropic’s COBOL tool: What it is and why it wiped billions of dollar for IBM – The Times of India

IBM shares suffered their worst single-day drop in over 25 years on Monday, February 23 after AI startup Anthropic announced that its Claude Code tool can automate the modernisation of COBOL—the decades-old programming language that sits at the heart of IBM’s mainframe business. The stock fell 13.2% to close at $223.35, wiping roughly $40 billion off IBM’s market value and dragging it down more than 24% year to date.The selloff was triggered by a blog post from Anthropic claiming that Claude Code could handle the exploration and analysis work that makes COBOL modernisation so expensive and time-consuming for enterprises. The company argued that AI tools can now compress what used to be multi-year, consultant-heavy migration projects into a matter of quarters.For IBM, which earns recurring revenue from mainframe hardware refresh cycles, software licences and COBOL-related services, the implication was hard to ignore: if AI can do what armies of consultants once did, a…