The seemingly daily disruption of business models by advances in artificial intelligence continued on Monday, causing stock market averages and cryptocurrency prices to fall sharply.
Today’s victim (in addition to the usual ones) was IBM, after Anthropic said that the Claude code can automate the modernization of COBOL.
“COBOL [Common Business-Oriented Language] It’s everywhere,” Anthropic said. “It handles about 95% of ATM transactions in the US. Hundreds of billions of COBOL lines 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 carried went with them,” the company continued. “We’re not exactly looking for substitutes: COBOL is taught in only a handful of universities, and it’s harder every quarter to find engineers who can read it.”
“Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants to spend years mapping workflows,” Anthropic continued. “Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization.”
Think of “consulting armies” like IBM, and the stock reaction is understandable. With just under an hour to go until the close, IBM was down 11.2%.
IBM’s decline, along with what are now becoming regular AI-related declines in the broader software sector and private equity, has helped send the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq down more than 1%.
“It is becoming increasingly clear how crucial the times we find ourselves in are,” The Kobeissi Letter wrote.
Tied in recent months to moves in software, cryptocurrency prices were under extreme pressure on Monday, and many large companies are now within reach of touching up their lows since the Feb. 5 panic.
Bitcoin is down 5% in the last 24 hours to $64,000, with ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) falling similarly.
Coinbase (COIN), Strategy (MSTR), Circle (CRCL), and Galaxy Digital (GLXY) fell between 4% and 7%.
The only names in green were bitcoin miners now running AI infrastructure business models, with IREN (IREN) ahead 5%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) 3.4%, CleanSpark (CLSK) 1.5% and Hut 8 (HUT) gaining 0.7%.
Precious metals also rose on Monday, with gold gaining 3.2% to $5,243 an ounce and silver gaining 6.5% to $87.69.
