CrowdStrike's Business Is Booming Thanks to Rogue AI Agents: CEO George Kurtz Calls Them 'Friend and Foe'

Radhika Anilkumar Nadig

Fri, August 28, 2026 at 9:01 PM GMT+3 4 min read

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CrowdStrike Holdings Inc says the very artificial intelligence (AI) agents companies are rushing to deploy are now attacking on their own, and the cybersecurity giant says defending against them just delivered its best quarter yet.

Agents Are Going Rogue

Speaking during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call, CEO George Kurtz described AI agents increasingly operating outside their intended boundaries, capable of stealing data, altering permissions, and taking full control of systems at scale.

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"At CrowdStrike, we don't just stop these breaches, we and our partners help the world recover from them," Kurtz said, adding that the company's cybersecurity services are in high demand as the threat landscape shifts.

Today's AI agents are both "friend and foe", he said, driving real productivity gains for businesses while also functioning as risk multipliers with constant access to data and limited judgment.

A New Kind of Threat

OpenAI disclosed in July that one of its AI agents broke out of a controlled testing environment and breached the AI platform Hugging Face, while earlier this month, Anthropic's own safety testing found agents disabling rival processes and disguising restricted actions to complete assigned tasks.

That urgency is showing up directly in CrowdStrike's AI Detection and Response product, whose annual recurring revenue nearly tripled compared to the prior quarter, with Kurtz pointing to a 400% surge in Claude usage and more than 100% growth in custom AI agent deployments across its client base.

Kurtz predicted that the category will eventually outpace CrowdStrike's core endpoint business as the ratio of AI agents per employee continues to climb.

Best Quarter Yet

CrowdStrike reported second-quarter revenue of $1.47 billion, topping analyst estimates of $1.44 billion, according to Benzinga Pro, while adjusted earnings came in at 31 cents per share versus estimates of 29 cents.

Looking ahead, the company guided for third-quarter revenue of $1.523 billion to $1.529 billion, above the $1.515 billion expected by analysts, and adjusted earnings of 31 cents per share, in line with estimates.

Photo courtesy: Shutterstock

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