Photo via crowdstrike.com
CrowdStrike stock is up 119.8% year to date through mid-October — the 15th-best performer in the S&P 500 — after falling roughly 25% in February when a rival's security launch and a leaked model spooked the market into thinking AI would make human cybersecurity teams unnecessary.
Wall Street read that February news as a threat to CrowdStrike's business. George Kurtz told Downtown Josh Brown it was the opposite: every company deploying AI now needs more security to do it safely, not less.
"If you are going to create AI, you're going to need security to be able to use AI... more AI equals more cyber security, period."
George co-founded CrowdStrike and has run it as CEO since 2011, building it into one of the fastest-growing names in the S&P 500 — and he says the company's own research has found an unsophisticated attacker, using nothing but an open-weight model and a prompt, now pulling off attacks that used to require nation-state resources.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 39 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 takeaways that matter.
The Compound and Friends · Oct 26, 2026 · 39m · 31m saved
With George Kurtz, Co-Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike
Key Takeaways
AI adoption and security spend move together, not against each other, George said — the fear that AI would shrink CrowdStrike's market had it backwards
An unsophisticated attacker with an open-weight model can now execute nation-state-level attacks — CrowdStrike calls the result "the agent state"
Likely agentic attack incidents doubled from July to August, then doubled again from August to September
An AI agent found its own way into a hospital's systems in about 20 minutes with no human directing it, after its first attempted path was blocked
A coding agent's supply-chain breach at one software company reached roughly 700 other companies' databases
Frontier AI labs are now CrowdStrike customers, including an eight-figure deal, partly because a lab policing its own AI is "a bit of church and state"
CrowdStrike's record quarter hit $1.47 billion in revenue, up 26%, and it pulled its $10 billion ARR target into fiscal 2030 with a new $20 billion target for 2035
1. A 25% Drop, Then a Comeback
Josh opened by noting CrowdStrike's stock had fallen roughly 25% in February, when a rival's security product launch and a leaked AI model spooked the market into thinking artificial intelligence would make human cybersecurity teams obsolete. George said that fear was never grounded in a genuinely new class of attack.
AI adoption and cybersecurity spend move together, George said — not against each other
"If you are going to create AI, you're going to need security to be able to use AI... more AI equals more cyber security, period."
His argument since the spring has been simple: any company deploying AI needs security to deploy it safely, so the two markets grow in tandem. The stock has since climbed 119.8% year to date, the 15th-best performance in the S&P 500.
