IBM becomes latest AI victim! Stock price plunges 11% amid threat from Anthropic programming language

　　Impacted by Anthropic's announcement that its Claude model now supports COBOL-related capabilities, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has become the latest casualty in the rapid iteration of AI technology, with its share price suffering a heavy blow.

　　On Monday afternoon, IBM's stock price plunged by 11%. Previously, Anthropic unveiled a new application scenario for its Claude Code product: automatically completing the most complex code analysis and exploration tasks in COBOL modernization.

　　COBOL (short for Common Business-Oriented Language) is a decades-old programming language widely used in commercial data processing, which is IBM's core business sector. Many transaction systems today still run on COBOL, including payment processing and retail transaction systems, making it a key target for cost-effective AI-driven modernization.

　　In a blog post on Monday, Anthropic mentioned, for example, that about 95% of ATM transactions in the United States are handled by COBOL.

　　"Every day, hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code run in production environments, supporting critical systems in finance, aviation, government, and other sectors. Nevertheless, the number of people truly proficient in this language is decreasing year by year," Anthropic wrote in the blog. "AI is extremely good at simplifying tasks that once made COBOL modernization prohibitively expensive."

　　The article further explains that Claude Code can assist in modernizing COBOL codebases: mapping dependencies among thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows, and identifying risk points that "would take human analysts months to discover."

　　"Legacy code modernization has stalled for years because understanding old code is often more costly than rewriting it. AI has completely changed this situation."

　　IBM has become the latest stock to decline due to concerns over AI. In recent weeks, news about AI has continued to disrupt investors, leading the market into a volatile environment of 'sell first, ask questions later.' Last Friday, after Anthropic announced the addition of code security scanning to Claude Code, the share prices of several cybersecurity companies dropped sharply, and the sector remained under pressure in Monday's trading.

　　Monday's sell-off has caused IBM's share price to drop nearly 22% so far this year.

Editor: Ding Wenwu