Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful What do airlines, banks, and insurance companies have in common? Besides being an absolute pain to deal with, they all rely on COBOL and IBM mainframe computers as core infrastructure. The computing giant's stranglehold over those markets may finally begin to crack, though. Anthropic has announced COBOL-specific functionality for its Claude AI bot, and IBM's investors responded with a resounding 13% drop in stock prices. Anthropic published its ideas in a blog post, and the company seems to know its target market quite well. There's a Code Modernization Playbook available for download, and existing YouTube videos letting Claude Code loose on a COBOL illustrate the concept. Mixing "COBOL," "AI bot," and "YouTube" in the same sentence is utterly anathema to common logic... and yet here we are.…