Anthropic just announced that #Claude can analyze #COBOL code — potentially helping enterprises modernize legacy systems and migrate to newer platforms faster.
Markets reacted quickly: investors dumped IBM stock, triggering a sharp ~13% drop on Monday (Feb 23, 2026).
And honestly… the reaction isn’t entirely irrational.
IBM’s mainframe ecosystem and its multi-billion-dollar modernization consulting business rely heavily on the complexity of legacy systems. If AI meaningfully reduces the cost and risk of understanding decades-old COBOL, it could reshape how modernization projects are delivered.
From Anthropic’s own framing:
COBOL still powers an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S.
Hundreds of billions of lines run critical systems across finance, airlines, and government — while the number of engineers who truly understand it keeps shrinking.
That’s the real pressure point: institutional knowledge is disappearing faster than organizations can modernize.
The interesting question isn’t whether AI will replace modernization work — it’s how it changes the economics of it.
Here’s the irony I keep thinking about:
What if IBM itself adopts Claude (or similar AI) to accelerate COBOL analysis, reduce delivery costs, and preserve margins inside the very modernization wave investors fear will shrink?
AI may not eliminate modernization consulting — it may simply redefine who captures the value.
#AI #EnterpriseIT #Mainframe #Modernization #IBM #Anthropic #SoftwareEngineering #DigitalTransformation
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