CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:CRWD) shares rose 4.6% in pre-market trading after Chief Executive George Kurtz responded to comments from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the pace of advanced artificial intelligence development.
Kurtz posted on social media over the weekend in response to an essay by Amodei calling for an industry-wide slowdown in the development of advanced AI systems. The CrowdStrike CEO argued that frontier AI laboratories would continue developing their technology regardless of decisions by individual companies and said the cybersecurity industry’s role was to make that development safer.
Kurtz also highlighted the potential for AI to enable a new generation of “machine-speed” cyberattacks.
Cramer Comments on CrowdStrike
CNBC host Jim Cramer subsequently said CrowdStrike was a stock investors needed to own, referring to the growing cybersecurity requirements associated with AI-enabled threats.
The comments followed CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con 2026 conference, where the company introduced products including Falcon Guardian, SafeMind and the Agentic Identity Provider, which are focused on security risks associated with AI systems.
RBC Capital, Raymond James and Wedbush also reiterated positive ratings on CrowdStrike and raised their price targets following the conference.
Cybersecurity Shares Gain as Semiconductor Stocks Decline
CrowdStrike’s pre-market advance came as some enterprise software and cybersecurity shares gained while semiconductor stocks faced selling pressure amid concerns about a possible slowdown in AI development.
The move occurred against declines in the broader US equity market, with the Nasdaq down 1.9% and the S&P 500 falling 0.8%.
CrowdStrike shares were trading at $216.27 in pre-market trading, compared with a 52-week range of $85.68 to $233.88.
Crowdstrike stock price
