IBM drops 13% in a single day, becoming the latest "victim"! Anthropic's new tool threatens its core business

On Monday, U.S. stocks saw IBM shares plummet over 13%, marking the largest single-day decline since 2000, making it one of the latest companies impacted by artificial intelligence technology.

The culprit behind this “tragedy” in the U.S. stock market is American AI startup Anthropic — the company stated that its “Claude Code” tool can be used to modernize legacy systems running COBOL.

IBM stock plunges over 13%

COBOL is a common coding system developed by General Motors in the late 1950s, often used for business data processing such as payment processing and retail transaction systems. According to Anthropic, about 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. use COBOL, making it a primary target for cost-effective AI disruption.

On Monday, Anthropic announced that Claude Code can be used to automate much of the exploration and analysis involved in modernizing COBOL systems, which is a key business for IBM. IBM has long sold large mainframe systems optimized for large-scale transaction processing, and COBOL is frequently used in such systems.

“Every day, billions of lines of COBOL code run in production environments, supporting critical systems in finance, aviation, and government sectors. However, the number of people proficient in this language is decreasing each year,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post on Monday. “AI is well-suited to simplify tasks that have historically made modernizing COBOL systems costly.”

According to Anthropic, Claude Code can assist in modernizing COBOL codebases by mapping dependencies across thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows, and identifying risks that would otherwise require months of manual analysis by human analysts.

“Modernizing legacy code has been stalled for years because understanding legacy code is more costly than rewriting it. AI changes that,” the blog stated.

This latest use case demonstrates Anthropic’s aim to address issues with outdated code systems and the challenges faced during digital transformation. Anthropic said these challenges are partly due to declining developer productivity and “technical debt” — the future costs incurred by taking shortcuts in software development, which lead to increased maintenance work down the line.

Amid growing concerns over AI, IBM has become the latest stock to decline.

In recent weeks, as fears around AI have intensified, U.S. investors have become increasingly uneasy, leading to volatile market behavior characterized by “sell first, ask questions later” — with IBM being the latest victim.

Last Friday, a series of cybersecurity companies experienced stock price drops after Anthropic launched a new feature within “Claude Code” called “Claude Code Security,” which claims to scan codebases for security vulnerabilities and identify software flaws for human review. During Monday’s trading, the sector remained under heavy pressure.

The sharp sell-off on Monday has caused IBM’s stock to decline more than 24% since the beginning of the year.

(Source: Cailian Press)