OpenAI AI Updates: October 20, 2026

1. OpenAI Targets COBOL, Fortran and Other Low-Resource Languages With New Coding Evals

OpenAI. OpenAI published work on improving its models’ coding ability in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic, which have far less public code and documentation than Python or JavaScript but still run critical systems (OpenAI cites COBOL as supporting more than 40% of online banking systems). The post introduces two evaluations: MultiLangBench, which tests whether a model can build a SQLite-compatible database engine from scratch in 20 programming languages, and a COBOL migration eval that checks whether a model can port existing programs to another language while preserving behavior. OpenAI says the effort was driven by enterprise and developer feedback that coding models struggle with these languages, which makes it relevant for teams scoping legacy modernization with ChatGPT and Codex. All reported results are OpenAI’s own. Source