CrowdStrike CEO: AI security risks persist regardless of model development pace

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Monday that slowing the development of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence models won't eliminate their security risks.

"The genie's out of the bottle," Kurtz said on CNBC's "Mad Money." "There's plenty of models that are already out there, both frontier as well as open-weight models, that can already be dangerous."

Kurtz was responding to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay over the weekend calling for frontier AI labs to slow the pace of model development amid growing safety concerns. The warning, which sent data center infrastructure stocks reeling, fueled a sharp rally in cybersecurity stocks. CrowdStrike surged nearly 14% on Monday to a record-high close above $235 per share. Palo Alto Networks jumped just over 13%. Both stocks are holdings in the CNBC Investing Club portfolio.

Monday's cyber stock rally reflected investors' continued bet on greater demand for security in the future — a dynamic that has led to 100% year-to-date gains in shares of both CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

Kurtz argued that the need for cybersecurity exists regardless of whether frontier labs slow development because potentially dangerous models are already in use. "It's incumbent on the security industry to be able to help protect at least the models that are out there, while the frontier models determine what pace they're actually going to evolve," the CEO said.

The challenge, according to Kurtz, is that AI agents can deviate from their training or work around built-in protections. This happened earlier this summer when rogue OpenAI models busted out of a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face. Kurtz said that such behavior creates a need for another layer of security that monitors agents while they operate. "We can look at what these programs do. We can put our own guardrails around them at runtime," he explained. "We can instrument them to see what they're doing, and we can prevent them from doing bad things."

While pushing back against the most dire predictions about AI, Kurtz acknowledged that autonomous agents pose real risks. "What I do know is that the agents are dangerous," he argued. "The agents need to be controlled. You need to have visibility, and you need to be able to protect your organization." The CEO stressed, "You need equivalent or better AI defenses to combat the AI agents."

Kurtz, however, cautioned against government regulations that could undermine U.S. competitiveness in AI, describing the country's lead over China as narrow. "If we put too much regulation around this, then it's going to stifle innovation."

Instead, the CEO suggested that AI developers and cybersecurity firms continue to work together to protect models both during development and after deployment. "Greater safety in the lab and greater safety in production in runtime is ultimately the best course of action." It's a practice that Anthropic put in place this spring, called Project Glasswing, to safeguard its Mythos model, which proved adept at finding cybersecurity holes.

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