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IBM stock was down 10% on Monday afternoon after Anthropic published a blog post about how its Claude Code tool can be used to modernize software written in the COBOL language, which handles large-scale batch transactions. Many of the software systems used by the federal government, banks, and airlines are written in COBOL (“Common Business-Oriented Language”), and most of those systems run on IBM mainframes. IBM also generates revenue from servicing, modernizing, and consulting on those mainframes. If COBOL code were converted to a more modern language, the systems would likely migrate to newer cloud servers. But modernizing COBOLwhich was developed 67 years agois a slow and expensive process, largely because the code can be difficult to understand and easy to break. It often reflects decades of institutional knowledge and workflows, and is frequently poorly documentedmeaning its true intent can only be uncovered through close analysis. These challenges are compounded by the shrinking pool of programmers who know COBOL. Most university computer science programs no longer teach it. Anthropic says this analysis phase is the most time-consuming and costly. Thats where Claude Code comes in. The tool can uncover and document workflows hidden within the code, identify dependencies across different parts of a code base, and give engineers insights into how to redesign systems. With AI, teams can modernize their COBOL code base in quarters instead of years, the company writes in the blog post. IBM says the analysis phase is not the hardest part. “Translating COBOL is the easy partthe real work is data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and hardware-accelerated performance built over decades of tight software and hardware coupling,” an IBM spokesperson said in an email. “That is the problem IBM has spent decades learning to solve, and AI is the most powerful tool we have ever had to do it.” COBOL was developed in 1959 via a public-private partnership that included the Pentagon and IBM, with the goal of creating a universal, English-like programming language for business applications. But private-sector companies have largely moved away from it. The code is difficult and costly to maintain and was designed for batch processing, making it poorly suited for modern cloud-based and real-time applications. (Anthropic and IBM did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) The U.S. government, despite repeated modernization efforts, continues to rely on COBOL-based mainframe systems to manage a wide range of financial transactions, including tax payments and refunds, Social Security benefits, and Medicare reimbursements. Anthropics blog post comes in the middle of a separate dispute between the company and the government. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is expected to meet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to explain why the company has not removed all safety guardrails from its AI models for Pentagon use. Anthropic has drawn the line at providing AI for autonomous weapons or systems that mass-surveil American citizens. At the moment, Anthropics models are the only ones approved for government use with classified information. Anthropic says its blog post about COBOL modernization is unrelated to its friction with the government. “The timing here isn’t related to a new product or any events,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “This is part of an ongoing series of content we’ve been publishing around code modernization and Claude Code.” And Anthropic’s blog post may not be the only factor affecting IBMs stock. Investor concerns about the speed and breadth of AI deployment have depressed enterprise software stocks more broadly. The market may also be reacting to uncertainty surrounding new global tariff announcements, which could affect tech companies and their supply chains.
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The Big Gulp might have some new competition in the realm of giant beverages from an unlikely dark horse: Dunkin‘. Over the weekend, Dunkin’ customers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts began posting head-turning images of giant coffee buckets on the menu at their local stores. While some commenters doubted the veracity of these reports, a Dunkin’ spokesperson confirmed in an email to Fast Company that the donut chain is indeed testing out a 48-ounce collectible bucket at select stores after noticing buzz around coffee buckets taking off on social media. A coffee bucket is exactly what it sounds like: a giant iced latte served in a plastic container that looks more like a garden tool than a cup. The novelty beverage took off this summer and appears to have been sparked by several different small businesses, including Noctua Coffee in Missouri, Dulce Vida in Oklahoma, and Wicked Southern Coffee in Connecticut, all of which attracted thousands of views on social media. Dunkin’ is no stranger to jumping on a trend, so it makes sense that the brand would arrive at this moment in the social media zeitgeist with a bucket in tow. In the past few years, Dunkin has experimented with wacky concepts like an alcoholic drink line, a donut deodorant, and a horny Halloween donut. Heres what to know about its latest launch: Where can I find the Dunkin bucket? Dunkin’ told Fast Company that the coffee bucket test is taking place at select stores in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but the company did not provide an official list of locations. Internet sleuths and coffee fanatics have uncovered a few stores that reportedly carry the bucket, according to a cursory search of social media. We have requested the full list of participating stores from Dunkin’ and will update this story if we hear back. What comes in the bucket? According to the Dunkin’ spokesperson, guests can fill their coffee buckets with classics like iced coffee, iced lattes, or Dunkin’ refreshers. Also available are three featured drinks: the blueberry cobbler iced latte, caramel coco iced coffee, and strawberry dragonfruit lemonade refresher. (We shudder to imagine the nutritional contents of these creations.) Customers report paying between $7 and $10 for their buckets. How are customers reacting? So far, customers main complaint for this behemoth of a beverage appears to be the impossible prospect of transporting it. One Instagram Reel with almost 85,000 likes from creator Elijah Boivin shows Boivin cradling the bucket above the caption, Me holding my Dunkin bucket because I dont know where to put it because it doesnt fit in the cup holder. A modern conundrum, indeed.
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E-Commerce
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has defended the resource-intensive use of AI by comparing it to all the energyand foodthat humans require, sparking a wave of backlash across social media. That comparison, experts in climate and tech spaces say, is misguided, downplays the climate risks associated with AI, and illustrates the disconnect between tech CEOs and the rest of society. Altmans comments came while speaking to the Indian Express at the India AI Impact summit. The outlet asked him to address some of the common criticisms of AI, including the amount of energy and water the technology requires. One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query, Altman says. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human, he continues. It takes like 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people who have ever lived. When considering the energy needed to train a human, Altman claims in the interview that AI has “probably already caught up to humans in terms of energy efficiency. Misguided comparison But the tech CEO’s blunt comparison is misguided, says Sasha Luccioni, climate lead of the AI platform Hugging Face. On a fundamental level, humans and AI models don’t use energy and natural resources in the same manner, and comparing the two makes no sense, she says in an email to Fast Company. AI models are trained on human data, Luccioni points out, so if comparing the two, you should also take into account the time and resources that went into writing the books and creating the data used to train AI models. To Luccioni, Altmans comments illustrate a “fundamental disconnect” between Big Tech leaders and broader society. These billionaires have built their fortunes on exploiting human knowledge and the earth’s natural resources, and continue taking both for granted while getting richer by the day, she adds. Fast Company reached out to OpenAI for comment. AI’s water and energy use Altmans comparison has drawn particular ire from those in the climate space, including Michael Mann, a climatologist and coauthor, with scientist Peter Hotez, of the 2025 book Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World. Indeed, the CEO’s statements tie into the very themes of the book. According to Mann, the book argues that forces like plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press promote anti-science rhetoric, which then hampers humanity’s ability to tackle everything from pandemics to the climate crisis. Exact calculations about AIs water and energy use vary, but many experts have raised alarms about its enormous power and resource needs. A 2026 report from Global Water Intelligence projects that water demand from the AI-driven New Economy will surge 129% by 2050, putting even more pressure on strained utility systems alongside climate threats. The International Energy Agency has likewise projected that total data center consumption, driven by AI, will double by 2030. Though Altman dismissed concerns over AI’s water use, he did say that energy consumption is a concern, and that because the “world is using so much AI . . . we need to move toward nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.” So far, the AI boom has led to an increase in natural gas power plants, even though it’s cheaper to build and run new clean energy projects. Longtermism and techno-utopianism According to Mann, Altman’s comments reek of controversial and potentially dangerous viewpoints that he says are common among tech executives, like longtermism and techno-utopianism. Longtermism promotes the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral imperative; its a belief that has been linked to the effective altruism movement. Looking long-term would suggest caring about climate change, because the effects of sustained fossil fuel emissions will have disastrous impacts on humans for years to come. But “longtermists” dont tend to regard climate change as an existential risk. Instead, they focus on threats that they say technology can solve. Techno utopianism, similarly, is a belief that technological advances are the way to achieve a perfect future society. As Mann sees it, Altman along with other tech CEOs promote an idea that society should focus on the benefits of AI and other technologies while “implicitly downplaying the risks and threats posed in the immediate term, including the climate crisis.” There is, as I would remind Altman and his ilk, no economy on a dead planet, Mann adds.
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