IBM stock was down 10% on Monday afternoon after Anthropic published a blog post about how its Claude Code tool can be used to modernize software written in the COBOL language, which handles large-scale batch transactions. Many of the software systems used by the federal government, banks, and airlines are written in COBOL (“Common Business-Oriented Language”), and most of those systems run on IBM mainframes.

IBM also generates revenue from servicing, modernizing, and consulting on those mainframes. If COBOL code were converted to a more modern language, the systems would likely migrate to newer cloud........

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