CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has fired back at fears that Anthropic’s new AI security tool could eat into his company’s business—by sharing what happened when he asked Claude itself to replace CrowdStrike. The move comes after Anthropic’s Claude Code Security launch wiped roughly a fifth off CrowdStrike’s market cap across two brutal trading sessions, dragging the wider cybersecurity sector down with it.Claude said no.“I have to be straightforward: building a replacement for CrowdStrike isn’t something I can do here,” the AI chatbot responded, according to a screenshot Kurtz posted on LinkedIn. Claude went on to describe CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform as “a massive platform built by thousands of engineers over a decade-plus,” citing its real-time kernel-level monitoring and proprietary threat intelligence graph as things that can’t be “replicated with a script.“Kurtz added his own punchline: “If you want to create AI, you need GPUs. If you want to deploy AI, you need security. That’s not a hallucination—it’s a fact.”
Anthropic’s Claude Code Security tool triggered a sharp sell-off across the cybersecurity sector
The CEO’s response comes after Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Code Security on February 20 sent cybersecurity stocks tumbling. The tool, currently in a limited research preview, scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests patches for human review. Anthropic says its Claude Opus 4.6 model has already found over 500 vulnerabilities in production open-source codebases—bugs that went undetected for decades.CrowdStrike shares dropped roughly 8% on Friday and fell another 10% on Monday. Across the sector, Okta lost over 9%, SailPoint shed about 9%, Cloudflare slumped over 8%, and Zscaler dropped around 5.5%. The Global X Cybersecurity ETF fell to its lowest level since November 2023.
Analysts say the sell-off is overblown since the AI tool doesn’t handle real-time threat detection
Several analysts have pushed back on the panic. Bank of America noted that Anthropic’s tool primarily threatens code scanning platforms like GitLab and JFrog—not endpoint protection or identity management vendors. Robert W. Baird analyst Shrenik Kothari called it “a panic-driven, narrative-led selloff,” pointing out that Claude Code Security doesn’t handle live intrusion detection, active threat response, or runtime security.Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora echoed that sentiment on a recent earnings call, saying he was “confused” why the market viewed AI as a threat to cybersecurity rather than a tailwind.
CrowdStrike has lost roughly a fifth of its market cap in just two trading sessions
Still, the broader software sector remains under pressure. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF is down more than 23% this year, on pace for its worst quarterly drop since 2008. Jefferies analyst Joseph Gallo expects “headline headwinds to intensify” before the cybersecurity sector finds its footing, but maintains that the industry will ultimately be a net winner from AI adoption.For now, Kurtz is betting that Claude’s own words make the best case for his company’s durability.
