IBM Plunges After Anthropic’s Latest Update Takes On Cobol

After disrupting countless Software/SaaS/finance/real estate/broker sectors, Anthropic’s Claude is now going after targeted companies. 

A little before 2pm ET, Bloomberg sent out a headline that Anthropic’s Claude has found yet another skillset:

• *ANTHROPIC SAYS CLAUDE CODE CAN AUTOMATE COBOL MODERNIZATION

A herd of panicked IBM longs flooded to the Claude blog to read more on what is happening. Here’s what it found (excerpted): 

COBOL is everywhere. It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US. 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.

The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them. Production code has been modified repeatedly over decades, but the documentation hasn’t kept up. Meanwhile, we aren’t exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter.

Given these roadblocks, how can organizations modernize their systems without losing the reliability, availability, and data they’ve accumulated over decades? And without breaking anything?

* * * 

How AI changes COBOL modernization

AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive. With it, your team can focus on strategy, risk assessment, and business logic while AI automates the code analysis and implementation.

* * * 

Start your COBOL modernization

The approach outlined above works for COBOL systems of any size. Tools like Claude Code can automate much of the exploration and analysis work described, giving your team the comprehensive understanding they need to plan and execute migrations confidently.

Start with a single component or workflow that has clear boundaries and moderate complexity. Use AI to analyze and document it thoroughly, plan the modernization with your engineers, implement incrementally with testing at each step, and validate carefully.  This will build organizational confidence and surface adjustments needed for your systems.

In kneejerk reaction, IBM stock, already down sharply on the day, and tumbling 20% from its all time highs just earlier this month, plunged $15 to the lowest level since Liberation Day, briefly dipping below $230…

… as the market realized that it is the latest target of the Claude disruption train. You see, Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL)  is a high-level, English-like compiled programming language developed specifically for business data processing, via IBM. As such, anything that disrupts this lucrative ecosystem created by IBM (code COBOL, then sell consultancy contracts to adjust the code which virtually nobody knows how to use), would immediately smash IBM stock… and that’s precisely what happened. 

Which begs the question: after various Claude updates caused hundreds of billions in market cap damage in the past 3 weeks, is the company’s strategy to keep rolling incremental disruption updates becoming Antrhopic’s self-funding strategy. After all, if Dario Amodei had bought puts on IBM, and the dozens of companies that have plunge dmore than double digits in recent weeks, he would have made billions, certainly enough to fund his company for months if not years. 

And if not Anthropic, when will OpenAI – which needs capital much more badly than its enterprise-focused peer – do the same?