Crypto suffers deeper declines as AI fears send IBM plunging 11%

The seemingly daily disruption of business models by advances in artificial intelligence continued Monday, sending stock market averages and crypto prices sharply lower.

Today's victim (in addition to the usual ones) was IBM, after Anthropic said Claude code can automate COBOL modernization.

"COBOL [Common Business-Oriented Language] is everywhere," said Anthropic. "It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S.. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government."

"The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them," the company continued. "We aren't exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter."

"Modernizing a COBOL system once required armies of consultants spending years mapping workflows," Anthropic continued. "Tools like Claude Code can automate the exploration and analysis phases that consume most of the effort in COBOL modernization."

Think of "armies of consultants" as IBM, and the stock's reaction is understandable. A bit less than an hour before the close, IBM was lower by 11.2%.

IBM's decline, along with what's now becoming regular AI-related tumbles in the overall software sector and private equity, has helped pull the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all lower by more than 1%.

"It’s becoming increasingly clear how pivotal the times we are in right now truly are," wrote The Kobeissi Letter.

Tied at the hip in recent months to moves in software, crypto prices were under extreme pressure Monday, with many majors now within range of retouching their lows from the Feb. 5 panic.

Bitcoin was lower by 5% over the past 24 hours to $64,000, with ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) down similarly.

Coinbase (COIN), Strategy (MSTR), Circle (CRCL) and Galaxy Digital (GLXY) were all down 4%-7%.

The only names in the green were those bitcoin miners now running AI infrastructure business models, with IREN (IREN) ahead 5%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) up 3.4%, CleanSpark (CLSK) up 1.5%, and Hut 8 (HUT) gaining 0.7%.

Also moving higher on Monday were precious metals — gold gaining 3.2% to $5,243 per ounce and silver higher by 6.5% to $87.69.