Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike are clear AI winners the market is sleeping on, because AI makes cyber offense 10x better, faster and cheaper and defense 10x more valuable to every CISO. Both already sit on endpoint, cloud, identity and application telemetry, a data and integration moat nobody can replicate overnight. They must shift from human-speed to AI-speed detection and resolution, but they have the leadership, M&A firepower, customer trust and channel distribution to win big. x.com 

AI-powered attacks are spreading so fast that companies are unlikely to cut security budgets, even if they slow broader AI spending. The latest wave hit governments, banks, hospitals, grocery chains and businesses, while AI finds vulnerabilities and breaks in around the clock. That is why Cloudflare, Zscaler, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks rose as broader AI concerns hit tech shares. x.com  x.com 

Cloudflare has three AI-driven trends working in its favor. AI will uncover more vulnerabilities; protection against more AI bots, agents and crawlers is needed; and its developer platform, including Workers, is becoming the default for agent-related development. CrowdStrike is not a favorite. x.com 

CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks should be enormous winners as agentic AI makes cybersecurity every enterprise's top priority, even ahead of AI investment. Threats from rogue internal agents and adversaries mean firms will rush to upgrade security, move to best-of-breed vendors and sharply raise budgets. Expected acceleration at leaders like CrowdStrike over the next 2-6 quarters looks far too low. CrowdStrike is the most advanced; Palo Alto is also favored, though some easy money is made. … Show more

CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks benefit from AI because it creates more security problems, so companies will need more advanced cybersecurity, not less. More than half of enterprise AI use happens outside IT oversight. Per JPMorgan, both are in good shape after Anthropic launched its Claude Mythos Preview security tool: instead of competing with them, Anthropic made them partners, which JPMorgan reads as a sign established vendors are essential to AI-driven defense, not replaceable by it. … Show more

CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks are at all-time highs despite no real signs that AI is boosting cybersecurity, while Zscaler tumbled as mixed guidance overshadowed strong Q3 results. x.com 

Microsoft is a relative beneficiary of slower, safety-focused frontier AI, mainly through cybersecurity, though to a lesser degree than CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. Agentic AI risk from misbehaving internal agents and adversaries should make security every enterprise's top priority, driving upgrades to best-of-breed providers and much larger budgets. A paced frontier also lowers extreme tail risk for software broadly. Compute plans should not change, as supply stays severely constrained. … Show more

The agentic era should consolidate cybersecurity's control plane toward platforms such as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, even as innovation at the edges fragments. Defensive agents rely on data gravity: CrowdStrike ingests about 3 trillion events a day and Palo Alto's Cortex nears it, while 60+ tool stacks add attack surface and can't move at machine speed, so CISOs buy platforms. New attack surfaces and monoculture risk, seen in CrowdStrike's 2024 outage, leave room for niche players. … Show more

CrowdStrike's AI risk is limited but real, because it is tied to white-collar workers and their devices. A prolonged fall in white-collar employment could cut Falcon agents deployed, and an advanced AI that clearly solved big parts of cybersecurity could squeeze budgets. Against that, its core has been machine learning from day one, and AI raises security spending as attackers use it; its CEO says Charlotte usage rose over 6x. It trades at 21x EV/ARR with ARR up 24% and 0% GAAP operating margin. … Show more

Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike are winners from the turmoil around the AI labs, because no one is going to trust one of those labs to defend them. x.com