Daijiworld Media Network – New York
New York, Feb 24: Shares of International Business Machines (IBM), popularly known as “Big Blue”, plunged 13% on Monday, marking the company’s steepest single-day decline in 25 years. The last comparable drop occurred in October 2000.
The sharp fall comes amid mounting fears of artificial intelligence-led disruption, with investors reacting to developments from AI firm Anthropic, whose latest announcements have triggered a broader sell-off across financial services, logistics and software-related stocks.
In a recent blog post, Anthropic stated that its Claude Code tool could be used to modernise legacy systems running on COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) — a programming language that has long been central to IBM’s mainframe business.
IBM has historically dominated large-scale transaction processing systems, with COBOL forming the backbone of many mission-critical operations. According to Anthropic, nearly 95% of ATM transactions in the United States rely on COBOL-based systems, making them a potential target for AI-driven transformation.
“AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive,” Anthropic said, adding that its tool can map dependencies across thousands of lines of code, document workflows and identify risks that would otherwise take human analysts months to uncover.
The company further noted, “Legacy code modernization stalled for years because understanding legacy code cost more than rewriting it. AI flips that equation.”
The development has intensified concerns over the future demand for IBM’s legacy mainframe services. With Monday’s slump, IBM shares are down nearly 24% in the first two months of the year.
Last week, Anthropic also introduced a new capability named “Claude Code Security”, designed to scan codebases for vulnerabilities and flag potential software risks. The announcement has weighed on other cybersecurity stocks as well. Shares of CrowdStrike, which had already declined on Friday, fell another 10% on Monday.
IBM shares ended the session 13.1% lower at $223.35, before edging slightly higher in extended trading.
Market analysts said the sell-off underscores growing investor anxiety over how rapidly advancing AI technologies could reshape traditional enterprise software and legacy infrastructure businesses.