Topline
CrowdStrike’s stock on Thursday rose more than 13% after its chief executive said the cybersecurity firm had its best quarter to date, thanks to its “largest market opportunity in our history” driven by mounting AI threats.
One investment research firm said CrowdStrike’s business was “firing on all cylinders.”
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Key Facts
Shares of CrowdStrike rose 13.4% to around $214.70 as trading opened Thursday, pacing the stock’s largest intraday gain since April 2025 (up 16.3%).
CrowdStrike on Wednesday reported quarterly earnings of $1.47 billion and earnings per share of $0.31, beating out consensus analyst estimates of $1.44 billion and $0.31, respectively, according to FactSet data.
The cybersecurity firm reported a 25% boost to annual recurring revenue to $5.84 billion, which featured a record $333 million in net new annual recurring revenue, or the amount of new recurring revenue the company added after accounting for lost business.
CEO George Kurtz said his firm’s latest fiscal period was the “best quarter in CrowdStrike’s history,” adding the “Mythos moment translated into mass-market acceptance that AI adoption needs security, and that’s CrowdStrike.”
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model was released to the public in June, but included additional safeguards after announcing in April it wouldn’t be open for public use because of broader security concerns.
CrowdStrike’s latest quarter brought increased optimism from Wall Street: TD Cowen, Stifel and Morningstar each raised their price target for CrowdStrike’s stock, and Morningstar analysts wrote the cybersecurity firm’s business was “firing on all cylinders” because of “AI-induced cyber demand.”
crucial quote
“Every enterprise will run on AI, and securing it is the largest market opportunity in our history,” Kurtz said.
key background
Broader cybersecurity concerns mounted after Anthropic claimed its Claude Mythos model could exploit security flaws in “every major operating system and web browser” and was too dangerous for public use. Anthropic said in July it discovered three separate breaches involving its Claude models, including Mythos 5, Opus 4.7 and an unnamed internal research test model that is “not planned for general release.” A week earlier, rival OpenAI reported one of its advanced AI models had hacked into the servers of Hugging Face, a platform that hosts open-source AI models. OpenAI said its models went rogue and carried out a cyber attack without being ordered to do so, calling the event an “unprecedented” incident.
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