IBM stock jumped Tuesday after the Dow tech giant announced a partnership with the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, along with several other product updates to boost the use of generative AI by businesses.
Anthropic's Claude large language models will be infused into IBM's software portfolio, starting with IBM's "integrated development environment" offering for software development. IBM also worked with Anthropic to develop a guide that helps enterprises build and operate AI agents, according to a blog post from IBM.
Anthropic is a top rival to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI. Amazon is one of the start-up's largest investors. The partnership with IBM comes as Anthropic is making a broader push into offering tools for enterprises, including software to help automate coding. Last week, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, which it described as the best coding model in the world.
The Anthropic partnership is among several announcements from IBM Tuesday morning, ahead of the company's annual TechXchange developer conference. Through a news release, the 114-year-old tech company highlighted its Watsonx Orchestrate offering, which it said has more than 500 tools to help businesses deploy customized AI agents.
IBM is among enterprise tech providers racing to offer software that enables AI agents that can go beyond the capabilities of AI chatbots by autonomously completing tasks. Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce are among tech giants offering or set to offer agentic AI tools.
IBM Stock Tests Breakout
In recent trading in the stock market today, IBM stock is up nearly 2% at 294.96. Shares broke out briefly above a 296.16 cup pattern buy point, according to MarketSurge.
Shares also hit a record high of 301.04 in earlier trading, IBM's first record high since late June.
IBM — one of 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average — saw its shares slump following its Q2 results in late July. IBM stock closed that month 14% lower and lost another 3% in August.
But Big Blue rallied in September, a month that included news about a quantum finance trial that boosted the tech giant's shares. The stock gained 16% overall last month and 5% so far in October.
IBM was ahead 31.6% year to date entering trading Tuesday, easily outperforming the S&P 500.
