The computer language COBOL was born in 1959, when Jawaharlal Nehru was still Prime Minister and China had just occupied Tibet. ADVERTISEMENTNow, the computer language still essential to many US banks and government agencies has finally met its match in the AI company’s Claude Code tool. “Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines and government,” the company, founded by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, said in a statement. Most of the mainframe computers that run COBOL are from IBM. There is a clear demand for a tool to streamline COBOL but whether Claude Code can fill those shoes is still to be seen.

Source: The Telegraph March 02, 2026 02:58 UTC