{"id":652779,"date":"2026-10-21T03:56:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T03:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/652779\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T03:56:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T03:56:17","slug":"openai-says-its-models-can-give-the-financial-sector-a-coding-makeover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/652779\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Says Its Models Can Give the Financial Sector a Coding Makeover"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artificial intelligence has deciphered ancient scrolls<\/a> and could even help humans communicate with other animals<\/a>, but now OpenAI is using the technology for another difficult translation task\u2014one that could have huge benefits for critical infrastructure like banking, nuclear energy, and government.<\/p>\n

The AI startup announced<\/a> Monday that its latest models, including GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6 Sol, have shown \u201csubstantial improvements\u201d in their ability to migrate old, outdated programming languages into newer ones. That\u2019s potentially a big deal, since some of those dated languages are the lifeblood of some basic services we all depend on. COBOL, for example\u2014short for \u201ccommon business-oriented language\u201d\u2014still handles 95%<\/a> of all ATM transactions, even though it was invented when Eisenhower was in the Oval Office (1959). Fortran, a programming language invented in 1957, is still widely used to simulate the functionality of nuclear reactors.<\/p>\n

While many software engineers trained to use COBOL have been retiring<\/a>\u2014and bringing their skills with them\u2014younger programmers have been delegating large portions of their work to AI assistants like Codex and Claude Code. While the datasets of those proprietary tools aren\u2019t public, they were very likely trained using more contemporary programming languages, rather than with \u201clegacy\u201d languages like COBOL. The result has been a dangerous and ever-widening gap<\/a> between the a new generation of AI-assisted coders and the software running a considerable portion of the financial sector, IT services, and government agencies.<\/p>\n

In new research \u201cguided by feedback from developers and enterprise customers,\u201d OpenAI set out to see if its newer models could help to bridge that gap. The company created two new model testing benchmarks, both of which are essentially intended to test AI\u2019s ability to translate legacy systems from one programming language to another.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first, called MultiLangBench<\/a>, gauges how well models can build a program called SQLite from scratch using a particular coding language. GPT-6 scored the highest on this benchmark, with an average pass rate of about 87%. The second test assesses whether models can migrate COBOL-run programs into newer programming languages\u2014C++, Java, Kotlin, Python, or Rust\u2014without meaningfully altering the program\u2019s behavior. This is a delicate dance. Financial systems using COBOL come with varying rules\u2014such as how and when decimals should be rounded\u2014which means OpenAI\u2019s models needed to pick up on that broader context. In a very loose analogy, you can think of it like translating a novel: the challenge lies in translating every word as accurately as possible, while simultaneously remaining true to the gestalt message and stylistic overtones of the original text. GPT-6.1 Sol with high reasoning effort scored very close to 100% on that test, according to OpenAI.<\/p>\n

\u201cTogether, these results show that our models are becoming significantly better at working with a wide range of programming languages,\u201d the company wrote.<\/p>\n

Anthropic wrote in its own blog post<\/a> early this year that Claude Code could similarly help businesses update outdated systems built on COBOL, a historically expensive and time-consuming process. \u201cWith AI, teams can modernize their COBOL codebase in quarters instead of years,\u201d the company wrote. Bloomberg reported<\/a> the same day that shares of IBM, whose mainframe computers are widely used throughout the financial sector and across many government agencies to run COBOL, fell 13% after Anthropic published its blog post\u2014its biggest single-day slide since 2000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence has deciphered ancient scrolls and could even help humans communicate with other animals, but now OpenAI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,1463,343,344,293731,85,46,1748,46299,125],"class_list":["post-652779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-cobol","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-openai","tag-programming","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}