Anthropic Empties Clip on IBM - Shares Crater 13% Over COBOL Modernization

“Look how they massacred my boy” - boomers everywhere… 

Big Blue just took it lying down as shares cratered 13% yesterday… its single worst day since October 2000… because Skynet Anthropic published a blog post. More specifically, Anthropic boasted about helping companies modernize COBOL, the programming language your grandfather's bank has been running since Kennedy was in office.

(Source: Giphy) 

From there, every Big Blue investors “depend” caught on fire. IBM shares are now down 27% in February alone, putting the stock on pace for its worst month since at least 1968. For context, in 1968, the internet didn't exist and IBM was basically the only tech company. Now it's getting bodied by a startup's developer tool announcement. The circle of life, or whatever Elton John said.

(Source: Yahoo Finance) 

As for the thesis itself, it’s pretty black and white. Anthropic's Claude Code can reportedly automate the tedious, expensive process of mapping and modernizing COBOL systems… work that previously required "armies of consultants spending years" (Anthropic's words, but also... accurate). Since most of the mainframes running COBOL are made by Big Blue, and a significant chunk of IBM's revenue is still tied to that mainframe business, Wall Street did what Wall Street does. It lost its collective sh*t. 

Of course, IBM's Rob Thomas fired back with word salads over“ it's not about the language, it's about the platform," arguing that mainframes deliver the same performance and security whether you're running COBOL, Java, or literally anything else. Which, ok fine. That's technically true. But telling investors "the thing being disrupted isn't the part that matters" while your stock is in freefall is a tough sell. That's like the Titanic's engineer explaining the hull integrity was actually excellent… Sir, we are sinking.

(Source: Giphy) 

Now to be fair, IBM knows this game. They literally launched their own AI-powered COBOL modernization tool back in 2023. CEO Arvind Krishna was bragging about "very wide adoption" as recently as last July. So the irony here is chef's kiss… IBM built tools to modernize COBOL, nobody blinked. Anthropic says they can do the same thing, and IBM loses $25 billion in market cap in a day. Brand matters, apparently. And right now, the AI brand belongs to the disruptors, not the incumbents. 

Translation: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become Anthropic’s b*tch…

In IBMs case, they will probably survive this. Mainframes aren't going anywhere tomorrow, and the clients running mission-critical systems on COBOL aren't about to hand their infrastructure to Claude because of a blog post. But the chart doesn't lie, and the market just told you exactly what it thinks about Big Blue's positioning in an AI-first world. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. But at negative 27% in a single month, somebody's definitely getting a phone call. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.