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.
Pia Singh
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.
Anthropic and its Claude chatbot have been making quite a lot of headlines lately — and I haven’t even gotten to the most consequential yet. In an ideal world, what Claude promises here would be a genuine improvement, enabling fast modernization and optimization of antiquated systems.