The seemingly daily disruption of business models by advances in artificial intelligence continued on Monday, sending stock market averages and crypto prices sharply lower.
Today’s victim (in addition to the usual ones) was IBM after Anthropic said that Claude code can automate COBOL modernization.
“COBOL [Common Business-Oriented Language] is everywhere,” Anthropic said. “It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines and government.”
“The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they brought with them left them,” the company continued. “We’re not exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and it’s getting harder every quarter to find engineers who can read it.”
“Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants who spent years mapping out workflows,” Anthropic continued. “Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization.”
Think “armies of consultants” like IBM, and the stock’s reaction is understandable. A little less than an hour before the close, IBM was down 11.2%.
IBM’s decline, along with what are now becoming commonplace AI-related declines in the overall software sector and private equity, have helped drag the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq down by more than 1%.
“It is becoming more and more clear how crucial the times we are in right now really are,” wrote The Kobeissi Letter.
Tied at the hip in recent months to moves in software, crypto prices were under extreme pressure on Monday, with many majors now within reach of retouching their lows from the February 5 panic.
Bitcoin was lower by 5% over the last 24 hours at $64,000, with ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) falling accordingly.
Coinbase (COIN), Strategy (MSTR), Circle (CRCL), and Galaxy Digital (GLXY) all fell 4%-7%.
The only names in the green were the bitcoin miners now running AI infrastructure business models, with IREN (IREN) ahead 5%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) up 3.4%, CleanSpark (CLSK) up 1.5% and Hut 8 (HUT) up 0.7%.
Also on Monday, precious metals rose – gold rose 3.2% to $5,243 per ounce and silver rose 6.5% to $87.69.
