CrowdStrike and Okta shares surged on Thursday after earnings showed that artificial intelligence adoption is pushing customers to spend more on cybersecurity tools.
Both companies beat Wall Street’s estimates for the fiscal second quarter and raised their forecasts, citing the AI agent threat
CrowdStrike gained 15% while Okta surged 20%. The broader cyber sector rallied as well, with Palo Alto Networks, SailPoint and Rubrik up about 9%. “We’re in an arms race,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said during an earnings call with analysts on Wednesday. “AI is driving more cyberattacks. AI is driving more cyber spending.
AI is driving a clear divide between the cybersecurity companies that solve problems and those that compound problems.” The company’s flexible Falcon platform offering, which lets customers switch out security tools, doubled year over year, he added. The release of advanced AI models like Anthropic’s Mythos, and attacks such as OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack, have raised the stakes for the cybersecurity sector in recent months, forcing businesses to scale their security stacks to combat mounting attacks orchestrated by AI agents. One clear winner has been identity security tools that help businesses secure and manage the explosion in AI agents.