On Monday, it was IBM's turn.
The grandaddy of tech companies saw its stock take a double-digit licking, plunging more than 13%, following a blog post by—you guessed it—an AI company. The author of IBM's woes was Anthropic, which decided to begin the week by bragging about
Claude's skills modernizing old Cobol computer code.
Cobol, or Common Business-Oriented Language, dates back to 1959. It's a relic of the Doo-Wop age but it's still in use in some mainframe computers (most notably, the giant machines that IBM sells) for jobs where reliability is critical—95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. for example, are handled by Cobol, according to Anthropic.
With the number of programmers fluent in the old language shrinking, it's tough for companies to maintain their Cobol-based applications and onerous to migrate to newer languages. That's why Claude is coming to the rescue: "With AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years," Anthropic wrote in the blog post.
While
IBM has long offered services and tools, including AI-based tools, to help customers modernize their Cobol applications, Wall Street reacted the same way it has to every report about AI learning a new trick in recent weeks: it panicked.
According to
Bloomberg, it was the biggest single-day drop for IBM's stock since October 2000. The vibe coding vibe has claimed another victim.
While we're on the subject of Cobol, don't miss this fascinating 2023 story by Fortune's
Ben Weiss about the 'Cobol Cowboys.' Will they ride again?—
AO 