The seemingly daily disruption of business models by advances in artificial intelligence continued Monday, sending stock market averages and cryptocurrency prices tumbling.
Today’s victim (in addition to the usual victims) was IBM after Anthropic said Claude’s code could automate COBOL modernization.
“COBOL [Common Business-Oriented Language] is everywhere,” Anthropic said. “It processes approximately 95% of ATM transactions in the United States. Hundreds of billions of COBOL lines are produced every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government. »
“The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them,” the company continued. “We’re not exactly creating replacements: COBOL is only taught at a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it is becoming more difficult each term.”
“Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows,” Anthropic continued. “Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume the majority of COBOL modernization efforts.”
Think of “armies of consultants” as IBM, and the reaction to the title is understandable. Just under an hour before the close, IBM was down 11.2%.
IBM’s decline, along with what is now becoming a steady AI-driven slide across the software and private equity industry, helped push the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq down more than 1%.
“It is becoming increasingly clear how crucial the period in which we currently find ourselves truly is,” writes the Kobeissi Letter.
Linked in recent months to developments in the software sector, cryptocurrency prices were under extreme pressure on Monday, with many majors now within reach of retouching their February 5 panic lows.
Bitcoin is down 5% in the past 24 hours to $64,100, with ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) falling similarly.
Coinbase (COIN), Strategy (MSTR), Circle (CRCL), and Galaxy Digital (GLXY) were all down 4-7%.
The only names in the green were Bitcoin miners now running AI infrastructure business models, with IREN (IREN) up 5%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) up 3.4%, CleanSpark (CLSK) up 1.5% and Hut 8 (HUT) up 0.7%.
