IBM shares crash 13%: Anthropic's AI has mastered ATM 'language'

Shares of systems integrator International Business Machines (IBM) plunged more than 13% in trading Monday, falling below the $223 mark. Investors began selling the company's securities after AI startup Anthropic announced that its Claude Code model now supports Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) programming.

This programming language has been widely used since the 1950s to process business data and is a key business area for IBM, CNBC explains . COBOL is still used in systems that process huge volumes of transactions, including payment transactions and retail settlements.

Claude Code can now automatically parse and analyze legacy code that was previously difficult to deal with when trying to modernize systems on COBOL, claims Anthropic. The AI startup estimates that COBOL underpins 95% of ATM operations in the US. "Hundreds of billions of COBOL strings run in production operation every day, powering mission-critical systems in finance, aviation, and the public sector. Despite this, the number of professionals who understand COBOL is declining every year," Anthropic said in a blog post.

An AI developer claims that modernizing legacy code has been bogged down for years because "it was more expensive to understand COBOL than it was to rewrite it."

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor