Shares in International Business Machines (IBM) recorded their steepest daily drop in over 25 years on Monday, after AI startup Anthropic announced its Claude Code tool could modernise a key programming language run on IBM systems.
The technology giant’s stock plummeted by 13.2per cent, marking its most significant decline since October 18, 2000.
This downturn follows concerns over the future of COBOL, a programming language extensively utilised on IBM mainframes across banking, insurance, and government sectors.
“Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows.
“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.
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 CRWD.O and Datadog DDOG.O also slumped on Monday, as investors weighed the potential impact of Anthropic’s new security tool on the industry.
It comes as U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has summoned artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon on Tuesday for what is expected to be potentially tough talks over the military use of Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence tool, Axios reported on Monday, citing sources.
Reuters reported exclusively this month that the Pentagon was pushing big AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic to make their AI tools available on classified networks without many of the standard restrictions that the companies apply to users.
Also this month, Axios reported that the Pentagon had been considering cutting ties with Anthropic over the latter’s insistence on retaining restrictions on how the U.S. military uses its models, which includes Claude AI.
According to its Monday report, Defense officials say the Pentagon’s talks with Anthropic are on the verge on collapsing.
A senior Defense official told the paper that Anthropic knows this is not a “get-to-know-you meeting,” according to the report.
An Anthropic spokesperson said “we are having productive conversations, in good faith,” according to Axios.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. The Pentagon, White House and Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
