OpenAI says its latest models are stronger at building and migrating COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic code
Partly confirmed
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 20 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra172 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5111 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon202 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7141 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 111 days before it.
Key facts
- OpenAI on X (Oct 19, 22:30 UTC; ~222k views by Oct 20 01:30 CEST, fxtwitter): ‘Our latest model advances bring stronger capabilities for building and migrating software in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic.’
- Pitch: ‘These languages power software that banks, governments, and businesses depend on. Progress here means understanding decades of business logic and helping developers modernize those systems while preserving what works.’
- Request: ‘If your team is working on these systems, tell us which languages and workflows we should tackle next.’
- Blog post ‘Advancing coding in low-resource programming languages’ (openai.com/index/low-resource-programming-languages) was blocked for us (403 / JavaScript wall), so its models, benchmarks and numbers are not recorded here
- Same day OpenAI open-sourced ‘MultiLangBench’, ‘An eval based on SQLite that benchmarks language models in multiple languages’ (GitHub repo description); whether it belongs to this announcement is not confirmed
- Context: in February 2026 an Anthropic post on Claude modernising COBOL coincided with a sharp fall in IBM’s stock (see related entry)
What happened
On the evening of Oct 19, 2026 (US time) OpenAI announced on X that its latest models are better at writing and migrating code in low-resource languages such as COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic, and linked a blog post. The X post names no model and gives no numbers.
Why it matters
Legacy COBOL and Fortran systems run much of banking and government. Labs now compete for enterprise modernisation work, a market whose stocks have reacted to such announcements before.
Not verified: the blog post could not be read (blocked), so which models, benchmarks and results it reports is unknown here.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 primary
Primary
- OpenAI on X: low-resource programming languagesx.com, official
- OpenAI: Advancing coding in low-resource programming languages (not read: blocked)openai.com, official
- GitHub: openai/MultiLangBenchgithub.com, code
Changes
- Filed from OpenAI’s X post (blog blocked)