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2026 is shaping up to be quite a challenging year for several information technology, cybersecurity, and software giants, particularly as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to disrupt the status quo. The latest shake-up comes from AI startup Anthropic, which has begun rolling out innovations that threaten to unsettle the dominance of these legacy players. And International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) appears to be one of the latest casualties.
On Feb. 23, IBM shares recorded their steepest single-day drop in more than 25 years, plunging over 13% after Anthropic announced that its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize COBOL. The aging programming language, developed in the late 1950s, predominantly runs on IBM systems and is still widely used in business data processing, such as payment processing and retail transaction systems.