OpenAI pitches its latest models as a fix for banking’s decades-old COBOL code

Pull cash from an ATM and the transaction quite likely runs on a programming language created in 1959, while Eisenhower was still president. COBOL (the name stands for “common business-oriented language”) processes 95% of all ATM transactions to this day. OpenAI now claims its newest models can convert that sort of code into something today’s developers would recognize. On Monday, the company said its latest models, GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6 Sol among them, have made “substantial improvements” at moving old, outdated programming languages over to newer ones. The pitch reaches past banking into other critical infrastructure, including nuclear energy and government. OpenAI’s COBOL test produced the headline figure. According to OpenAI, GPT-6.1 Sol running with high reasoning effort scored very close to 100%.