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Posted on 02/25/2026 5:52:46 AM PST by Twotone
International Business Machines stock is getting slammed Monday, becoming the latest perceived victim of rapidly developing AI technology, after Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize legacy systems that run COBOL.
Shares of IBM closed the day lower by nearly 13.2%, at $223.35 per share, after Anthropic on Monday said Claude Code could be used to automate the exploration and analysis work that drives most of the complexity in COBOL modernization, a key IBM business. IBM has long sold mainframe systems that are optimized for large-scale transaction processing, where COBOL has often been used.
Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL is a dominant code system developed in the late 1950s often used in business data processing, such as payment processing and retail transaction systems. An estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. use COBOL, according to Anthropic, making it a prime target for cost-efficient AI disruption.
“Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government. Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year,” Anthropic wrote in a Monday blog post. “AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive.”
Claude Code can help modernize COBOL codebases by mapping dependencies across thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows and identifying risks that “would take human analysts months to surface,” Anthropic said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
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Around 80% of Anthropics technical staff is Indian/Pakistani citizens living here in the USA. There are millions of them here now. The government is lying about the total numbers. It is an invasion.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Knock on wood, I've never had an error from an ATM -- 100 percent accuracy over the last 35 years or so.
AI is going to cost many who work in IT their jobs.
I see the advertising for Anthropic disguised as news is rolling big-time.
I am so old, I know COBOL.
Not really that bad, except that it required a lot of typing.
Like all the other old programming languages, it is rather simple, so it may not be that hard for AI to break (modernize).
It is interesting that IBM takes a hit, supposedly from Anthropic, while right below this article on FR is an article on how Anthropic is being attacked by China.
I suppose that it means that the Stock Market is overfilled with stupid people.
I used to work for IBM in the 1980s when it used to dominate the IT market. Back then, it ran mainframes on COBOL. 10 years before I started, it ran mainframes on COBOL. It sounds like, at its core, IBM still is in the business of running mainframes on COBOL.
“”AI is going to cost many who work in IT their jobs.””
It’s going to cost all of us a lot ~PERIOD~ - having to live and find our way around it to conduct business and UNDO the messes it can/will cause. It’s already impossible to conduct business on the phone without a human being on the other end - you hang up disgusted and go without answers hoping for a different avenue to get those answers.
What’s a S0C4?
“I am so old, I know COBOL.”
Assembler here.
Rank pikers be ye all
COBOL and RPG here.
I know COBOL. It was easy to adjust to after learning BASIC.
There have been cross-compilers since the 1980s, even for microcomputers.
Redoing code is nothing new.
I even had a parallel FORTRAN in my hands, for a bit, in the late 80s.
I’m having difficulty understanding why this would tank IBM’s stock or scare people at all.
AI is a tool.
The computer is a tool.
The automobile is a tool.
All can be used for good or evil.
Most often, I use it as a front end search engine. It presents search results in an orderly format and, if asked, provides the sources for the summaries and details.
I sometimes use AI as a code generator, Claude specifically. You have to tell it to use original code and provide peer-reviewed open sources for algorithms, a tight line to walk for any development team. Attribution must be made in the commit log, to the AI and to any other sources.
This is not something that can be done by AI alone.
AI is like having a grad student intern.
You have to check their work.
AI are excellent at swift, thorough research and are available 24/7. But they are a tool, a means to an end, not the end.
“I used to work for IBM in the 1980s when it used to dominate the IT market. Back then, it ran mainframes on COBOL. 10 years before I started, it ran mainframes on COBOL. It sounds like, at its core, IBM still is in the business of running mainframes on COBOL.”
IBM mainframes never ran on COBOL.
There are often wild claims concerning the cutting edge of technology. The COVID “vaccines,” cold fusion, Donuts’s solid state battery etc come to mind.
Watch for those chads.
IBMs biggest problem was it was late getting into the PCs.
I was evening operator/programmer for a NCR 315 in the 60s in a local bank. Had its own proprietary language. Tape drives, punch cards, paper tape readers and mechanical printers. Got me through college. Great memories.
Every single bank in the US, and probably the entire western world is 100% dependent on COBOL.
Not even Claude can fix the world’s largest spaghetti factory.
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