CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks Race Into AI Cybersecurity

IndustryEarningsProduct / Tech Impact 4
โดย TheStreet·US·Read original
Summary · why it matters

CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks are racing to answer the question Jensen Huang raised on Sept. 10, when he told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference that cybersecurity is likely to become AI's next major growth market. CrowdStrike unveiled SafeMind at its Fal.Con conference on Sept. 1, an agentic cybersecurity system built by its own Cyber Superintelligence Lab on top of open Nemotron models, which the company says detects threats 29% more accurately and remediates them six times faster than the frontier models it benchmarked against. CrowdStrike's fiscal second quarter revenue rose 26% to $1.47 billion, with net new annual recurring revenue climbing 51% to a record $333 million, and CEO George Kurtz disclosed an eight-figure Falcon Flex deal with a frontier AI lab. Palo Alto Networks took the opposite path, integrating CyberArk and Chronosphere and adding Console, an AI native platform for agentic enterprise workflows; its Next Generation Security annual recurring revenue reached $9.1 billion, up 63% year over year, and total remaining performance obligations crossed $20 billion for the first time, rising 34% to $21.2 billion, even as it swung to a GAAP net loss of $282 million in the quarter. Investors rewarded only CrowdStrike's report, sending its shares up roughly 20% on Aug. 27, while Palo Alto's shares fell more than 5% despite revenue rising 34% to $3.41 billion in its fiscal fourth quarter. The threat behind both bets is not hypothetical: Anthropic told Reuters it disrupted a Russia-linked hacking campaign that used its Claude models against more than 20 Ukrainian government and defense targets, and a joint study by Wiz and Irregular found AI agents completed sophisticated offensive security challenges for under $50 in computing costs versus close to $100,000 for the same work by paid human researchers.

Impact on stocks 2

Cybersecurity & Digital Trust▲ · 2 stocks
Crowdstrike Holdings Inc
CRWD
▲ PositiveCapitalTechnologyrelevance

CrowdStrike's fiscal Q2 revenue rose 26% to $1.47B with record net new ARR of $333M, and shares jumped ~20%.

Palo Alto Networks Inc
PANW
▲ PositiveCapitalTechnologyrelevance

Palo Alto's Next Generation Security ARR reached $9.1B, up 63%, and remaining performance obligations crossed $20B, up 34%.

Theme Impact 5

Off-coverage companies 4

AnthropicPrivate± Mixed
relevance

ChronospherePrivate± Mixed
relevance

CyberArk Software LtdPrivate± Mixed
relevance

IrregularPrivate± Mixed
relevance

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