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IBM had its worst trading day since the dot-com bubble burst

It’s Blue Monday... or it certainly was for IBM yesterday, as the stock suffered its biggest one-day drop since 2000, when the technology company’s shares tanked amid the wider bursting of the dot-com bubble.

Big Blue wound up in the big red, shedding more than 13% by yesterday’s close, fueled by an Anthropic blog post detailing Claude Code’s ability to automate modernization of Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) code.

COBOL’s ubiquity and antiquity, the language will celebrate its 67th birthday in September, makes it a pretty big deal — and a pretty big pain — not least for IBM, which is behind most of the mainframe computers that run the language, per Bloomberg.

IBM hit back with its own blog post yesterday outlining that the value its core mainframe computer business delivers isn’t dependent on a single language like COBOL or Java, but on the platform itself. The company also highlighted watsonx, its own AI tool suite which has COBOL modernization capabilities.

COBOL’s ubiquity and antiquity, the language will celebrate its 67th birthday in September, makes it a pretty big deal — and a pretty big pain — not least for IBM, which is behind most of the mainframe computers that run the language, per Bloomberg.

IBM hit back with its own blog post yesterday outlining that the value its core mainframe computer business delivers isn’t dependent on a single language like COBOL or Java, but on the platform itself. The company also highlighted watsonx, its own AI tool suite which has COBOL modernization capabilities.

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Hims discloses SEC probe as its legal woes mount

Hims & Herssaid that it is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, adding another legal challenge for the telehealth company.

The SEC requested that it preserve records related to its compounded GLP-1 treatments, Hims disclosed in a regulatory filing on Monday. The news came after the company reported earnings results and gave soft full-year guidance.

Shares extended losses to down more than 8% in postmarket trading after the 10-K, which detailed this probe, was released.

Hims is already facing a patent infringement lawsuit from Novo Nordisk and a potential probe from the Department of Justice. Both arose after Hims released (and then discontinued) a copy of Novo's Wegovy pill.

Hims is already facing a patent infringement lawsuit from Novo Nordisk and a potential probe from the Department of Justice. Both arose after Hims released (and then discontinued) a copy of Novo's Wegovy pill.

Hims oral semaglutide

Hims reports Q4 earnings beat, revenue miss

The report comes as the company has faced mounting legal troubles related to its short-lived Wegovy pill copy.

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IBM sinks as Anthropic positions Claude Code as the ideal tool for code modernization

IBM is sinking as Anthropic touts Claude Code’s ability to modernize COBOL code bases.

COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language, is a programming language for business functions. Code written in this language has been developed and altered over decades, getting increasingly clunky and cluttered on mainframes, and the number of experts who know this language well is dwindling.

Anthropic said in a blog post that Claude Code can automate COBOL modernization, and, with the help of human judgment, migrate this code incrementally into modern languages, where it can be hosted across various cloud providers.

That is a potential threat to the likes of IBM, an architect of the COBOL system that uses the language on its mainframes for enterprises. IBM is also offering AI tools (like watsonx) to modernize COBOL code, but crucially, wants to keep the outputs running on its hardware and software.

“The strength of our Z placement fuels our flywheel for growth with its attractive 3x to 4x stack multiplier across IBM,” CFO James Kavanaugh said after the company’s latest earnings report. “Z” refers to IBM’s mainframe offerings. As such, getting and keeping customers on IBM’s mainframe is a key way the company drives revenue growth for other software and services.

COBOL is standard in many financial operations (like ATMs), as well as in government and airline systems, as Anthropic notes, so users may want to keep this code tied to one mainframe architecture for security, reliability, and speed (it’s the devil they know!) rather than migrating to a different platform.

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