Shares of International Business Machines recorded their steepest daily drop in more than 25 years on Monday, after AI startup Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize a programming language run on IBM systems. ADVERTISEMENTCOBOL is a programming language widely used on IBM mainframes across banking, insurance and government systems. Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization," Anthropic said in a blog post on Monday. "With AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years," it added. Shares of cybersecurity companies including CrowdStrike and Datadog also slumped on Monday, as investors weighed the potential impact of Anthropic's new security tool on the industry.

Source: The Telegraph February 24, 2026 06:54 UTC