International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) signage on the ground of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
International Business Machines inventory is getting slammed Monday, changing into the most recent perceived sufferer of quickly growing AI know-how, after Anthropic mentioned its Claude Code instrument may very well be used to modernize legacy techniques that run COBOL.
Shares of IBM closed the day decrease by almost 13.2%, at $223.35 per share, after Anthropic on Monday mentioned Claude Code may very well be used to automate the exploration and evaluation work that drives a lot of the complexity in COBOL modernization, a key IBM enterprise. IBM has lengthy bought mainframe techniques which are optimized for large-scale transaction processing, the place COBOL has typically been used.
Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL is a dominant code system developed within the late Fifties typically utilized in enterprise knowledge processing, equivalent to cost processing and retail transaction techniques. An estimated 95% of ATM transactions within the U.S. use COBOL, in line with Anthropic, making it a chief goal 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 weblog publish. “AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive.”
Claude Code may help modernize COBOL codebases by mapping dependencies throughout hundreds of traces of code, documenting workflows and figuring out dangers that “would take human analysts months to surface,” Anthropic mentioned.
“Legacy code modernization stalled for years because understanding legacy code cost more than rewriting it. AI flips that equation,” the weblog publish mentioned.
This newest use case builds on Anthropic’s effort to disrupt legacy code techniques and corporations’ digital transformation efforts, which it says are slowed down, partially, by lowering developer productiveness and “technical debt.” Technical debt refers back to the future prices of shortcut options in software program improvement that result in elevated upkeep for firms down the road.
IBM is the most recent inventory to fall on AI fears, which have rattled buyers in current weeks and contributed to a unstable “sell first and ask questions later” buying and selling atmosphere. On Friday, a slew of cybersecurity firms tumbled after Anthropic unveiled a brand new functionality it constructed into Claude Code, referred to as Claude Code Security, that it mentioned can scan codebases for safety vulnerabilities and discover software program vulnerabilities for people to overview. The sector remained under pressure in Monday’s session.
Monday’s sell-off introduced IBM shares down greater than 24% 12 months thus far.
