IBM just got a brutal reminder that being a pioneer in AI doesn’t guarantee you won’t get disrupted by it. Anthropic’s newly unveiled Claude Code tool, designed to automate COBOL modernization, sent IBM shares tumbling 11.2% on February 23 and triggered a cascade across equities and crypto markets alike.
Bitcoin dropped 5% to $64,000 on the same day. The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all fell more than 1%.
What Claude Code actually does, and why it matters
Here’s the thing about COBOL: it’s a programming language from 1959 that somehow still runs the world. It underpins roughly 95% of US ATM transactions. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL production code execute daily across finance, government, and insurance systems.
Modernizing that code, translating it into newer languages or restructuring it for cloud environments, has been one of the most lucrative consulting gigs in enterprise tech for decades. IBM has been the dominant player in that space, charging premium rates for teams of specialists who understand both the ancient code and the modern systems it needs to talk to.
