CrowdStrike shares surged nearly 14% to a record close above $235 on September 14 after CEO George Kurtz discussed the risks posed by advanced AI models on CNBC’s “Mad Money.” Kurtz summarized the landscape by saying, “The genie’s out of the bottle,” arguing that dangerous AI systems already exist rather than representing a distant risk. Palo Alto Networks rose more than 13% the same day, while Cloudflare and Zscaler also gained significantly. The rally followed an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that raised concerns about the rapid development of frontier AI models and related safety risks. Kurtz said the growing use of autonomous AI agents—software systems that make decisions and perform tasks with limited human intervention—will expand the cybersecurity attack surface, creating new requirements for runtime monitoring, behavioral analysis and identity protection. He presented CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform as a response through agent control and identity security. The market reaction also reflected a policy debate: Kurtz opposed regulations that could weaken U.S. AI development relative to China, while arguing that AI defenses should be equivalent to or better than China’s. Earlier in 2026, Anthropic’s Mythos model had been widely cited as a critical inflection point, helping elevate AI security from an IT issue to a board-level priority.