Cybersecurity Stocks Soar Amid Mounting Concern Over AI Hacks
Both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei urged the United Nations Security Council this week to adopt new AI safety standards.
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Cyber-intrusive AI agents are kinda like ants in the kitchen. If you notice one or two, it’s likely they’re all over the place. On Thursday, the Australian government confirmed that a rogue OpenAI agent breached a government health portal in June, in one of several new instances of virtual breaking and entering discovered by nonprofit AI research lab Transluce this week.
As policymakers debate the case for sweeping new AI guardrails, the world isn’t waiting. It’s making a beeline for the cybersecurity industry’s services.
Life Hack
Case in point: A Goldman Sachs basket of marquee cybersecurity stocks has roughly doubled in value since early April, when Anthropic tapped the brakes on its hacktastic Mythos model. In a note to clients last week, Bank of America analysts called cybersecurity a “mega-theme and enabler of the AI era.” In CrowdStrike’s most recent earnings report late last month, which featured a better-than-expected revenue forecast, CEO George Kurtz called the AI boom “the largest market opportunity in our history.”
Capturing that value, however, may require hitting a moving target:
- In an appearance on CNBC earlier this month, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said some $1 trillion in cybersecurity infrastructure is already obsolete. This week, the company unveiled a new “Continuous Frontier AI Defense” that employs a handful of models including Mythos 5 and GPT-5.6-Cyber.
- Meanwhile, both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei urged the United Nations Security Council this week to adopt new AI safety standards. On Thursday, The Information also reported that the two companies and Google are making moves to launch a new safety-standards body of their own without government oversight, probably as early as this year.
Island Fever: Cybersecurity startups are riding the wave as well. Data security company Cyera raised $400 million this week in a Series G extension led by Goldman Sachs. On Thursday, startup Island said it had raised the same amount at a $6.4 billion valuation, and said its annual recurring revenue has doubled every year since 2022.
