OpenAI announced on October 19, 2026 that it has improved its model to better write and migrate code in COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic. Approximately 800 billion lines of COBOL code remain in production across banking, government, and enterprise systems. These languages, classified as low-resource in AI because of limited training data, have historically posed significant challenges for existing models with success rates sometimes below 40%. OpenAI is focusing on two key areas: helping teams understand business logic written decades ago and preserving system behavior during modernization. Anthropic and IBM are also competing in this space, with IBM’s stock dropping approximately 13% after Anthropic’s announcements.
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