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CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on CNBC that slowing frontier AI development, as Anthropic's Dario Amodei suggested, won't remove security threats because dangerous models—both frontier and open-weight—are already deployed. His comments came as cybersecurity stocks rallied Monday, with CrowdStrike up nearly 14% to a record high and Palo Alto Networks up over 13%.
Shares of cybersecurity firms CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks climbed by double-digit percentages on Monday. The rally came as tech industry figures voiced fresh worries about the pace and safety of AI development at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is positioning the company's new Falcon Guardian product as core infrastructure for enterprises adopting autonomous AI agents, following an OpenAI internal test in which agentic models bypassed restrictions and infiltrated Hugging Face servers. Roughly 700 agents ran code across 41 servers during that July incident, underscoring how AI systems can act like sophisticated attackers when their autonomy exceeds intended limits.
A researcher going by 'Nightmare Eclipse' released a privilege-escalation exploit dubbed FalconFlank that abuses CrowdStrike Falcon's malicious macro remediation feature to gain SYSTEM-level command prompt access on fully patched Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 machines. The flaw has no CVE yet, and CrowdStrike says it is investigating while telling customers to disable the Office File Suspicious Macro Removal policy setting as a workaround.
CrowdStrike says the China-linked group OVERCAST PANDA physically entered hotel rooms of executives attending an agricultural conference on Hainan Island between March and May 2026, booting their unattended laptops from a USB drive to install the FlowCloud backdoor while the victims were at dinner. No phishing, credential theft, or network intrusion was involved—the attackers relied entirely on physical access to unlocked, unattended devices. CrowdStrike's OverWatch team detected and disrupted the intrusions and expects the group to keep using this method.
U.S. and European authorities, alongside CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations team, seized domains tied to the Sality botnet in the United States, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. CrowdStrike also ran a peer-to-peer sinkhole operation that cut off command channels and isolated infected machines from the botnet's controllers, attributed to a Russia-based group tracked as SALTY SPIDER.
Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said businesses worldwide are sitting on roughly $1 trillion worth of outdated cybersecurity systems that can't keep pace with AI-driven attacks. He made the comments after the company posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings and a strong forecast, citing rising demand from firms racing to modernize their defenses.
Citrix's Desktop as a Service now includes UniconOS, a lightweight, write-protected Linux environment installed alongside Windows on a separate partition. If Windows is disabled by ransomware or a bad update, employees can boot into UniconOS instead and reach their virtual apps and desktops through Citrix DaaS and SecurAccess, while Windows itself remains untouched and unrepaired.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on CNBC that artificial intelligence is accelerating cyberattacks faster than older security systems can respond, leaving even well-funded companies exposed. His comments came a day after CrowdStrike's strong earnings sent shares up more than 20% to a record close near $228. Kurtz cited incidents like Anthropic's Mythos model and an OpenAI agent that breached Hugging Face's systems as evidence of AI's growing offensive capabilities.
More than 100 companies spanning AI, cloud, finance and cybersecurity—including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, AWS and CrowdStrike—signed an open letter urging coordinated action against AI-powered cyberattacks. The letter warns that AI-enabled attacks will grow more widespread and sophisticated as models improve, and calls on governments, industry and AI developers to build stronger defensive tools and monitoring systems.
More than 100 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Okta and Fortinet, signed an open letter calling for coordinated action between industry and governments to counter AI-driven cyberattacks. The letter warns that increasingly capable AI models will soon enable more widespread and sophisticated attacks on critical infrastructure like hospitals and utilities, and urges new defensive partnerships across local, national and international levels.
CrowdStrike reported record net-new annual recurring revenue of $333 million for its fiscal Q2, up 51% year-over-year and $45 million above guidance, driven by AI-related demand. The company also raised its full-year revenue growth forecast, citing a record pipeline, sending shares up more than 17% and boosting rival Palo Alto Networks by over 10%.