As advances in artificial intelligence continue to disrupt business models on a daily basis, stock market averages and cryptocurrency prices have fallen significantly.
After Anthropic said it could automate COBOL modernization with Claude code, today’s victim (in addition to the usual victims) was IBM.
“COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is everywhere,” says Anthropic. “We process an estimated 95% of U.S. ATM transactions. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical financial, airline, and government systems.”
“The developers who built these systems retired many years ago, leaving behind the institutional knowledge they inherited,” the company continued. “We’re not exactly developing a replacement. COBOL is taught in only a handful of universities, and it’s getting harder and harder to find engineers who can read COBOL every quarter.”
“Modernizing a COBOL system used to require an army of consultants to spend years mapping workflows,” Anthropic continued. “Tools like Claude Code allow you to automate the exploration and analysis phase that takes most of the effort in COBOL modernization.”
If you think of the “consultant army” as IBM, you can understand the stock price reaction. With just under an hour to go, IBM was down 11.2%.
IBM’s decline added to what is becoming a regular occurrence of AI-related declines across the software sector and in private equity, contributing to a more than 1% decline in stocks in the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that the times we are in now are indeed pivotal times,” the Kobisi Letter writes.
Cryptocurrency prices have been under extreme pressure on Monday in conjunction with software movements in recent months, with many majors now within range of new lows from the February 5th panic.
Bitcoin fell 5% in the past 24 hours to $64,000, with Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) falling as well.
Coinbase (COIN), Strategy (MSTR), Circle (CRCL), and Galaxy Digital (GLXY) all fell between 4% and 7%.
The only company names in green are Bitcoin miners currently running an AI infrastructure business model, with IREN (IREN) up 5%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) up 3.4%, CleanSpark (CLSK) up 1.5%, and Hut 8 (HUT) up 0.7%.
Precious metals also rose on Monday, with gold rising 3.2% to $5,243 an ounce and silver rising 6.5% to $87.69.
