Can AI help solve the COBOL code crisis?
Bùi Đăng Minh•Monday, October 26, 2026•3 min read
OpenAI and Anthropic are leveraging artificial intelligence to tackle the global crisis of aging legacy software like COBOL that still powers critical infrastructure.
- COBOL was created in 1959 and remains foundational for a massive share of online banking, credit card processing, and ATM transactions worldwide.
- OpenAI reported that its latest models achieved between 87 and 98 percent accuracy in translating COBOL code into modern programming languages.
- Anthropic has also targeted this market by promoting its Claude Code agent to streamline the modernization of legacy software.
- Industry experts caution that rewriting code is much easier than safely breaking apart and replacing deeply integrated legacy systems.
- Academics noted that OpenAI benchmarks relied on relatively simple tasks and fall far short of real-world modernization complexity.