Affected by Anthropic's Claude's announcement to support COBOL-related capabilities, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) became the latest victim of the rapid iteration of AI technology, and its stock price plummeted. IBM shares fell 11% in afternoon trading Monday. Previously, Anthropic announced a new application scenario for its Claude Code product:Automate the most complex code exploration and analysis tasks in COBOL modernization.
COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is a decades-old programming language that is widely used in commercial data processing, which is IBM's core business segment. Today, a large number of transaction systems are still running on COBOL, including payment processing, retail transaction systems, etc., making them a key target for cost-effective AI transformation.
Anthropic noted in a blog post on Monday that, for example,About 95% of all ATM transactions in the United States are processed by COBOL.
"Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code are run in production environments every day, supporting critical systems in finance, aviation, government and other fields. Despite this, the number of people who actually master this language has been decreasing year by year." Anthropic wrote in the blog, "AI is very good at simplifying the tasks that once made COBOL modernization prohibitively expensive."
The article further explains that Claude Code can help modernize COBOL code bases: sorting out dependencies among thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows, and identifying risk points that "would take human analysts months to discover."
“Legacy code modernization has been stagnant for years because it’s more expensive to understand the old code than to rewrite it. AI turns that around.”
IBM has become the latest stock to fall on concerns about AI. AI-related news has continued to disturb investors in recent weeks, and the market has fallen into a volatile environment of "sell first and ask why later". Shares of several cybersecurity companies fell sharply on Friday after Anthropic announced new code security scanning capabilities for Claude Code, and the sector remained under pressure in Monday trading.
Monday's sell-off sent IBM sharesIt has fallen nearly 22% this year.