"COBOL handles 95% of U.S. ATM transactions. Hundreds of billions of lines run in production. The developers who built these systems have retired. Universities don't teach COBOL. Modernization has stalled because understanding the code costs more than rewriting it. Claude Code, Anthropic says, can automate the exploration and analysis phases - mapping dependencies, documenting workflows, and identifying risks."
"IBM launched watsonx Code Assistant for Z in August 2023. It uses a 20-billion-parameter model trained on COBOL-Java pairs to help developers selectively refactor COBOL into Java - including application discovery, dependency mapping, automated refactoring, and validation. CEO Arvind Krishna said in July 2025 that the tool 'has got very wide adoption.'"
Anthropic published a blog post on Monday about using Claude Code to modernize COBOL, causing IBM's stock to drop 13% in its worst single-day loss since October 2000. Accenture and Cognizant also fell. This marked the second market selloff in a week triggered by Anthropic announcements across different sectors. However, Anthropic's actual announcement describes a playbook for using AI to analyze and refactor COBOL code—a capability that major technology companies including IBM, OpenAI, AWS, and Microsoft have been developing and deploying for years. IBM launched watsonx Code Assistant for Z in August 2023, featuring a 20-billion-parameter model trained on COBOL-Java pairs for selective refactoring, with CEO Arvind Krishna confirming wide adoption in July 2025.
#cobol-modernization #ai-code-analysis #market-reaction #enterprise-software #legacy-system-modernization
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