OpenAI says GPT-6 is much better with legacy programming languages such as COBOL and Fortran

OpenAI improved its latest AI models for "low-resource" languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic. These languages have far less available training code than something like Python, but according to OpenAI, they prop up critical infrastructure worldwide. IBM estimates that COBOL powers more than 40 percent of online banking systems and 95 percent of all ATM transactions.

OpenAI built two evaluations to measure progress. MultiLangBench (GitHub) asks models to build a SQLite-compatible database engine from scratch. With maximum reasoning effort, GPT-6 Astra hits an average test pass rate of 87.4 percent across 20 languages, up from about 38 percent for GPT-5.6 Terra. GPT-6 Luna scores 40.3 percent, barely edging out GPT-5.6 Terra (37.9 percent) but at a much lower cost.

On the COBOL migration benchmark, which translates COBOL into C++, Java, Kotlin, Python, or Rust, GPT-6.1 Sol reaches 86.6 percent accuracy at low reasoning effort, compared to 5.4 percent for GPT-5.6 Sol. Cranking up reasoning effort pushes accuracy to 97.9 percent.

AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.