IBM posts steepest daily drop since 2000 after Anthropic says AI can modernize COBOL

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.

A blog post just wiped $30 billion off IBM in a single afternoon.

Not a product launch. Not an earnings miss. Not a competitor undercutting on price.

A five-minute blog post explaining that Claude can read COBOL.

IBM dropped 13%. Worst single-day loss since October 2000.… pic.twitter.com/2hqcNhEdkG

— Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ (@shanaka86) February 23, 2026

“With ⁠AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead ⁠of ‌years,” it added.Software stocks ​have been battered in recent ‌months by market fears around the growing capabilities of AI tools, particularly ‌following the ​launch ​of ​plug-ins from Anthropic’s large language model Claude, seen as the ​startup’s push to become an application ⁠layer.

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.