IBM is the latest AI casualty. Shares are tanking 13% on Anthropic programming language threat

Shares of IBM closed the day lower by nearly 13.2% at $223.35 per share. Anthropic 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.

Although COBOL was developed in the late 1950s, it remains widely used for business data processing. Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, it is a dominant legacy code system often used in 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.

“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.”

Claude Code can help modernize COBOL codebases by mapping dependencies across thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows and identifying risks that “would take human analysts months to surface,” Anthropic said.

“Legacy code modernization stalled for years because understanding legacy code cost more than rewriting it. AI flips that equation,” the blog post said.

This latest use case builds on Anthropic’s effort to disrupt legacy code systems and companies’ digital transformation efforts, which it says are bogged down, in part, by decreasing developer productivity and “technical debt.” Technical debt refers to the future costs of shortcut solutions in software development that lead to increased maintenance for companies down the line.

IBM is the latest stock to fall on AI fears, which have rattled investors in recent weeks and contributed to a volatile “sell first and ask questions later” trading environment. On Friday, a slew of cybersecurity companies tumbled after Anthropic unveiled a new capability it built into Claude Code, called Claude Code Security, that it said can scan codebases for security vulnerabilities and find software vulnerabilities for humans to review. The sector remained under pressure in Monday’s session.

Monday’s sell-off brought IBM shares down more than 24% year to date.