COBOL and Fortran stop being blind spots: new models lift SQLite rebuild pass rates from 26.8% to 87.4% across 20 languages
OpenAI reports model progress on low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic, with two evaluations: MultiLangBench asks a model to build a SQLite-compatible database engine from scratch, and a COBOL migration evaluation asks it to migrate programs while preserving behavior. On MultiLangBench, GPT-6 Astra averages an 87.4% test pass rate across 20 languages versus 26.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol; on COBOL migration, GPT-6.1 Sol reaches 86.6% at low reasoning effort versus 5.4%.