February 24, 2026 IBM shares slid sharply on Monday after Anthropic unveiled a new AI system aimed at automating one of enterprise tech’s most lucrative consulting markets. The stock fell by more than 10 per cent intraday, with Accenture and Cognizant also declining as investors reacted to the potential disruption. Per Forbes, the plunge marks the largest stock loss recorded by the stock in a single day since 2000.
In a blog post on Monday, Anthropic announced Claude Code, a tool built to automate early phases of COBOL modernization that traditionally required large consulting teams. Anthropic said the system can explore massive legacy codebases, map dependencies and document workflows — tasks that previously took months of manual analysis.
IBM, Accenture and Cognizant were already trading lower amid broader tech weakness, but the AI announcement intensified the drop. Each company generates revenue from helping organizations modernize decades-old COBOL systems still embedded in critical infrastructure.
Despite its age, COBOL remains deeply entrenched in global computing. The language is estimated to handle about 95 per cent of ATM transactions in the United States, with hundreds of billions of lines still running across industries including banking, airlines and government. However, the pool of developers capable of maintaining those systems continues to shrink as the original workforce retires.
According to Anthropic, the number of people who understand COBOL “shrink every year,” as AI threatens to modernize the legacy code.
The company said Claude Code could compress modernization timelines significantly by automating analysis and implementation tasks. The tool identifies program entry points, traces execution paths, maps data flows between modules and documents dependencies across hundreds of files.
Anthropic also argued that modernization has historically stalled because understanding legacy code was often more expensive than rewriting it. AI, Anthropic said, changes that equation by accelerating discovery and reducing the need for large teams of specialists.
Alongside the tool launch on Monday, Anthropic released a Code Modernization Playbook outlining how organizations could shift legacy projects from multi-year timelines to shorter implementation cycles.
