Shares of US multinational technology corporation IBM fell 13.2% in the trading session on February 23, marking the strongest one-day drop since October 2000, after artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced the new capability of the Claude Code programming tool related to COBOL language.
This move caused IBM's market capitalization to evaporate about 30 billion USD in just a few hours of trading, although there was no negative information about the company's business results or products.
The main reason comes from investors' concerns about the possibility that AI could change the field that is IBM's traditional strength.
COBOL is a long-standing programming language, which is still widely used on IBM's large-frame computer systems in the fields of banking, insurance and government agencies.
Modernizing the previous COBOL systems often required a large team of consultants, lasting many years and costing very high.
However, Anthropic said that new AI tools can automate the analysis and discovery stages, which account for the majority of the effort in the system transformation process.
According to this company, AI can help businesses complete the COBOL modernization process in a few quarters instead of a few years.
The information published in a blog post quickly spread on the financial market and became a trigger for the wave of IBM stock sell-offs.
Not only IBM is affected, shares of some software and cybersecurity companies such as CrowdStrike and Datadog also fell sharply as investors re-evaluated the risks from new AI tools, including security solutions developed by Anthropic.
Analysts believe that market reactions show growing concern that AI may reduce demand for traditional technology services, a sector that once brought stable revenue to many long-standing corporations.
However, some experts believe that the actual impact may take time to verify, because the transformation of large-scale enterprise systems still depends on many factors outside of technology.
This event continues to show the increasing influence of artificial intelligence on the stock market and the strategies of global technology corporations.
