IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast
- Reference: 1771890783
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/23/ibm_share_dive_anthropic_cobol/
- Source link:
Anthropic’s [1]post points out that COBOL applications remain prevalent and often handle critical applications for governments, airlines, and financial institutions. The AI upstart also noted that COBOL-proficient programmers are hard to find, that attempts to train more of them have not grown the population, and that migrating from COBOL is therefore risky and expensive.
And then, because vibe coding tool Claude Code is Anthropic’s hammer and any software development problem looks like a nail, the company suggested using AI to help rewrite COBOL apps.
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“AI can assess which components are safe to move and which need careful handling,” Anthropic suggests. “Areas with accumulated technical debt get documented before they become migration surprises.”
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At first glance, the post portends trouble for IBM's mainframe business.
But Anthropic’s post comes about three years after IBM itself [5]suggested using AI to rewrite COBOL as Java and created a product called "watsonx Code Assistant for Z" to do it.
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Indeed, the perils and opportunities presented by COBOL migrations, and the potential for AI to accelerate refactoring of legacy apps, are not new to the technical community. Just last week, Infosys chairman [7]Nandan Nilekani said the rise of AI means the cost of rewriting legacy apps has become affordable and made such moves imperative.
In recent years, we’ve also reported mainframe migration initiatives from [8]AWS , [9]Microsoft and IBM spin-out Kyndryl , and [10]NTT .
[11]AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO
[12]The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere
[13]IBM straps AI to Db2 console in bid to modernize the old warhorse
[14]Infosec community panics as Anthropic rolls out Claude code security checker
All that activity didn’t dent IBM’s mainframe business: Last month, Big Blue [15]reported its highest mainframe revenue for 20 years, and CEO Arvind Krishna attributed that in part to the same AI code conversion tools Big Blue spruiked in 2023. Krishna also said mainframes still offer the lowest operating cost for some workloads.
Still, COBOL remains a drag on many organizations: The UK government last year [16]bemoaned the big bills it pays to keep creaky COBOL code from crashing.
IBM’s share price dive came amid speculation that AI will ruin SaaS companies’ business models, an idea that is thought to be behind substantial share price decreases for the likes of Salesforce, Atlassian, Adobe, ServiceNow, and HubSpot.
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So thanks, Anthropic, for your contribution to the long tradition of COBOL FUD, because if nothing else your post has shown AI has the power to wake people up to old and well-known risks associated with legacy tech. ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://claude.com/blog/how-ai-helps-break-cost-barrier-cobol-modernization
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aZ0wdQwdZtmUakr258e5LgAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZ0wdQwdZtmUakr258e5LgAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZ0wdQwdZtmUakr258e5LgAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/22/ibm_says_genai_can_convert/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZ0wdQwdZtmUakr258e5LgAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/asia_tech_news_roundup/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/09/aws_mainframe_modernization/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/07/kyndryl_and_microsoft/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/19/ntt_data_ibm_mainframe/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/13/call_center_ai_superheroes/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/31/long_lived_tech/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/08/ibm_db2_intelligence_center/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/claude_code_security_panic/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/29/ibm_q4_2025/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/15/cobol_in_the_public_sector_feature/
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZ0wdQwdZtmUakr258e5LgAAAFU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
COBOL is easy...
...JCL isn't. CICS isn't that hard, it's got an API that is well documented and pseudo-conversational programming style isn't that far off from server-side web applications. DB2 is just another RDBMS if you're an applications developer. ISPF contains concepts foreign to most people under 50, but ZOWE exists. IMS is so far out there it isn't even visible from here.
People have begun pointing out that it isn't COBOL that's the roadblock, it's all that other mainframe *stuff* that doesn't have a Linux or Windows analogue. A file system without directories, required disk space allocation, dataset types.
That's just the applications side of things, the systems (admin) side is *completely* different.
Rewriting COBOL as some other language? I mean, if you want to, I guess, go ahead; I don't see the ROI. If the goal is to be free of the mainframe because of cost, be sure your cloud (because of course that's the target environment) costs are cheap enough to make it worth your while.
this is crazy talk
So yet again (like the SAAS vendors losing share price recently) something that AI might be able to do (in this case cobol conversions) but which it doesn't have a track record in causes investors to panic.
What COBOL code that is running is because it is mission critical, is running on mainframes, has hooks into mainframe sub-systems like CICS and JCL and if it was able to be moved it would have happened already (I have done several POC's back in the day for this and my conclusions were always the risks are too high).
Thus (given the workloads COBOL supports) it would be even more critical for AI to be 110% perfect in the conversion process (typically to Java!!!!).
There is nothing new under the sun with COBOL conversions, the toolkits have been around for decades but it's the other mainframe ecosystem stuff around it that makes it hard (outside of CICS and JCL)... like assembler modules that are called (who's gonna convert that and what do you convert it to)... operational workflows/interconnections to other systems etc.
I know the share market is forward looking but this panic like behaviour is illogical.
It seems to be a pre-cursor to how they will react when it is found (at least by investors) that AI (in it's current form) is a dead end.
Bluck
PS. look like I as ninja'ed by another poster on this..great minds think alike
Well analysed. Migration off a mainframe is an ecological move. Difficult to get tropical fish to thrive in arctic lakes
Difficult to get tropical fish to thrive in arctic lakes
Although the AI build out is working diligently to change that by degrees. :)
Just recently [1] a shark was observed in antarctic waters for the first time ever.
[1] https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/deep-sea-shark-caught-on-camera-in-antarcticas-waters-for-the-first-time/
Re: Difficult to get tropical fish to thrive in arctic lakes
He doesn't have a town house in Manhattan where he could stay with friends any more.
“Could” - if only someone ipays us …
Reading the linked article, nowhere does it say Claude has actually been used or has the functionality today to do a COBOL migration, it just says AI “could” and then gives a load of generic stuff about what an AI tool like Claude could do.
So this is just another AI puff piece from those who believe the emperor is wearing new clothes, so fine only the initiated can see.
AI Saved Humans from COBOL?
Please award it the Nobel Peace Prize.