IBM Stock Crashes 10% as Anthropic’s Claude AI Targets Legacy Systems

IBM witnessed a staggering 10% crash in its stock price, wiping out $31 billion in market capitalization after Anthropic announced that its Claude AI can now handle complex legacy code conversions. The tool, ‘Claude Code,’ is specifically designed to modernize COBOL systems—a core business segment for IBM’s mainframe and consulting divisions. The sudden sell-off reflects deep-seated fears that high-margin maintenance contracts for trillion-dollar legacy systems could be disrupted by highly efficient, autonomous AI tools, marking IBM’s steepest decline in over two decades.