IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization

IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and runs on the kind of mainframe systems IBM has sold for generations. Anthropic said the shrinking pool of developers who understand COBOL had long made modernization cost-prohibitive, and that AI could now flip that equation by mapping dependencies and documenting workflows across thousands of lines of legacy code. The sell-off deepened a rough 2026 for IBM, whose shares are now down more than 22% year to date.

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