This might be the weirdest thing you read all day.
IBM shares cratered by more than 13% during the second half of trading on Monday, shedding more than $30 billion from investors' portfolios. It was the stock's worst single-day performance since the dot-com selloff began more than 25 years ago, and all because of a five-minute blog post by AI startup Anthropic explaining that its Claude Code tool now speaks fluent COBOL.
Wait, wut?
Before we get to the weird stuff, a little background.
In computing terms, COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) might as well be Attic Greek, ancient and spoken by only a few specialists. But it's also the programming language used in embedded systems in everything from ATMs to airlines to government systems.
Tech analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera wrote on Monday that the COBOL programmers who built those systems "retired decades ago," and that "finding engineers who can even read COBOL gets harder every quarter." He added, "Entire consulting empires existed because the code was too old, too tangled, and too critical to touch. Companies paid IBM billions because the alternative was catastrophic system failure."
In other words, IBM built a multibillion-dollar Castle Wall of Ignorance around its portfolio.
Yet it took just a single blog post to breach those fortifications.
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