OpenAI reports benchmark gains for COBOL and other legacy-language coding
The company says GPT-6 Astra passed 72.1% of COBOL tests in its SQLite-building evaluation; its separate migration results use OpenAI-designed hidden tests.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Primary source: X
Why it matters
COBOL migration tests whether coding models can preserve business behavior across costly modernization projects. OpenAI's results show progress on its own evaluations, while production safety and enterprise adoption remain unresolved.

OpenAI says its latest models have improved at writing and migrating code in COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic, targeting languages that remain embedded in financial and other business systems. In an October 19th post on X, the company described the work as a capability update; it did not announce a standalone product. Its technical account says developers can try the models on coding tasks through OpenAI's API.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.