IBM Stock Crashes 13% as Anthropic AI Threatens COBOL Business

IBM shares dropped 13.2% in their worst single-day decline since 2000 after Anthropic announced Claude Code can automate COBOL modernization. The market is pricing in that IBMs lucrative COBOL business is now worth basically nothing. COBOL is an ancient programming language from the 1950s-60s that still runs massive banking, insurance, and government systems worldwide. IBM built their entire mainframe business around COBOL. If AI can now handle the expensive process of migrating COBOL code to modern systems, IBMs services revenue faces existential threat. The fear is spreading to other legacy tech companies.