CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks surging today as AI doomsday fears jolt cybersecurity stocks

Cybersecurity stocks CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks surged on Monday amid growing concern about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI). Shares of the two companies were up double digits at the time of this writing Monday afternoon: CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWD) was up 15%, while Palo Alto Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: PANW) was up 13%. Both make products designed to detect, investigate, and neutralize modern cyber threats using endpoint protection, a method used to protect devices such as desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and servers from cybersecurity threats. The surge comes amid fresh warnings about the security risks associated with AI after a massive AI breach, in which autonomous OpenAI models went rogue, coordinating a multiday hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned “message board,” as Fast Company previously reported. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown on AI development, saying, “we must pace the frontier . . . progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” “The frontier will move at whatever speed it moves,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz clapped back in a post on X. “The rest of the wo…