Advances in artificial intelligence are disrupting business models seemingly every day, causing stock market averages and cryptocurrency prices to plummet.
Today’s victim (in addition to the usual victims) is IBM, after Anthropic said Claude’s code could automate COBOL modernization.
“Cobol [Common Business-Oriented Language] “It’s everywhere,” says Anthropic, which handles an estimated 95 percent of all ATM transactions in the United States. Hundreds of billions of COBOL lines are running in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines and governments. “
“The developers who built these systems retired years ago, taking with them the institutional knowledge they brought with them,” the company continued. “We’re not looking for a replacement – only a handful of universities teach COBOL, and it’s getting harder and harder every quarter to find engineers who can read it.”
“Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants to spend years mapping workflows,” Anthropic continued. “Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization.”
Think of the “army of consultants” as IBM, and the stock’s reaction is understandable. Less than an hour before the close, IBM shares fell 11.2%.
IBM’s decline, coupled with AI-related declines that are now the norm across the software industry and private equity world, sent the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq down more than 1% each.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear how critical the times we’re in now really are,” the Corby West Letter wrote.
Cryptocurrency prices were under extreme pressure on Monday due to software volatility in recent months, with many major currencies now within range of their post-February 5 panic lows.
Bitcoin is down 5% in the past 24 hours to $64,100, with ethereum (ETH) and solana (SOL) also falling.
Coinbase (COIN), Strategy (MSTR), Circle (CRCL) and Galaxy Digital (GLXY) were all down 4%-7%.
The only names rising were those Bitcoin miners now running artificial intelligence infrastructure business models, with IREN (IREN) up 5%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) up 3.4%, CleanSpark (CLSK) up 1.5% and Hut 8 (HUT) up 0.7%.
