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CrowdStrike CEO Calls Generative A.I. an ‘Arms Race,' But Says Company Is Positioned Well to Face Adversaries

Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
  • CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike George Kurtz told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Thursday that his company is ready to take on "adversarial AI," or antagonists using generative AI technology for nefarious reasons.
  • CrowdStrike shares fell in extended trading on Wednesday, even after the company released a successful earnings report with revenue that beat consensus estimates.

The CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Thursday that his company is ready to take on "adversarial AI," or antagonists — often outside of the country — who use AI technology to hack into systems for nefarious purposes.

Kurtz stressed that his company has been working to fight these adversaries for some time and that their intelligence and strength should not be underestimated.

"Nation-state adversaries are using the same technologies — generative AI and other techniques — to try and defeat systems," he said. "So, it's one of those areas you have to have the best AI, you have to have the best data set, which we believe this kind of human-annotated information that we have to be able to train our generative AI algorithms, but yeah — it's an arms race, and we think we're positioned well."

CrowdStrike is a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense and announced Wednesday that it received Impact Level 5 (IL5) authorization, which makes the company privy to some highly sensitive cybersecurity materials. This, Kurtz said, will facilitate "up to millions more of endpoints and workloads." Kurtz also claimed that CrowdStrike's new technology is able to stop breaches more effectively than the legacy-based products used by Microsoft.

"[Microsoft's] fundamental endpoint technology is still legacy, it's still signature-based, gets updated six or seven times a day, and that's the reason why I started CrowdStrike," Kurtz said. The legacy technologies were not capable of stopping breaches, he said, adding that many of their incident response engagements are Microsoft customers.

Despite releasing a successful earnings report Wednesday, CrowdStrike's shares fell more than 11% in after-hours trading; but on Thursday they were off by only 1.61%. The company saw $692.6 million in revenue, significantly higher than the consensus estimate of $677 million.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that CrowdStrike received Impact Level 5 authorization from the Department of Defense. A previous version mischaracterized Impact Level 5.

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