IBM shares fell 11.2% on February 23 after Anthropic unveiled Claude Code, a tool designed to automate COBOL modernization. COBOL, a programming language from 1959, underpins roughly 95% of US ATM transactions, and IBM has been the dominant player in modernizing that code. Claude Code can read through massive COBOL codebases, understand what they do, and map out how to update them, work that previously required expensive human consultants. The market’s reaction signaled a belief that Anthropic’s tool poses a genuine structural threat to one of IBM’s most reliable revenue streams. Bitcoin dropped 5% to $64,000 on the same day, and the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all fell more than 1%.