By Author: Sunlight Xiang
Publication Date: 2026-02-25 00:30:00
Wall Street’s anxiety over artificial intelligence is spreading, and the latest target is IBM (IBM). The legacy tech giant’s stock suffered its worst single-day drop in more than a quarter-century on Monday, tumbling over 13% and wiping roughly $31 billion off its market capitalization.
The trigger for the sell-off wasn’t an earnings miss or a guidance cut—it was a blog post from AI startup Anthropic.
The Anthropic Effect
In a blog post yesterday, Anthropic said that AI tools could help modernize systems based on COBOL code. The company, which is behind the Claude AI platform, noted that its coding tools could be used to automate the experimentation, analysis, and implementation phases associated with modernizing COBOL-based systems. The post also pointed out that COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities today, and the pool of engineers capable of reading the code is shrinking.
That was enough to put…