Rogue AI

‘We need to chill the hype a bit,’ said 7AI founder Lior Div at a cybersecurity meetup in Las Vegas this week. ‘Can AI find vulnerabilities fast? The answer is yes. We’ve already proven it.’

Cyber execs were just discussing the Hugging Face incident – you know, the one where OpenAI cyber models broke out of a training environment to hack the open-source platform. But in the last two weeks, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta ($META) all revealed their AI models went rogue during routine security testing.

That suggests the issues are a bit deeper than an OpenClaw agent exploiting a gym’s booking API to boot users from waitlists.

The new ‘agentic AI’ reality has put cyber firms back in focus: CrowdStrike ($CRWD), Palo Alto Networks ($PANW) surged 5% to new 52-week highs on Monday. Smaller cyber firm Rubrik ($RBRK) gained 9%, while Netskope ($NTSK), Zscaler ($ZS) and SailPoint ($SAIL) also moved higher. 

BTIG analysts say AI is driving a fresh modernisation wave in endpoint security, with CrowdStrike standing to gain most directly. CrowdStrike’s Agentic MDR platform is designed to autonomously handle security incidents at machine speed.

Palo Alto’s Prisma AIRS 3.0 extends to AI agents with runtime controls and an agentic identity provider. Analysts say the identity platform stands to benefit from the proliferation of AI agents, with products like XSIAM and Chronosphere creating a ‘data moat.’

You might think of those as tools that give agents an ID, a leash of exactly which doors they’re allowed to open and a way to instantly cut off that badge if they start to misbehave. 

While CrowdStrike and Palo Alto focus on blocking network-level attacks, software firms are also tackling the issue in different ways. 

ServiceNow’s ($NOW) angle is governing agent identities. Last week, it launched six AI-native security solutions focused on turning its workflow platform into a cyber-defence layer. Datadog’s ($DDOG) tools watch what AI agents do during runtime and flags when behaviour looks like an attack. 

As the AI cyber wars begin, the companies to watch will be building the armour for all threat levels.

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Samy Sriram

Markets Analyst

Samy is a markets analyst at Stake, with seven years of experience in the world of investing, working across roles in private banking, venture capital and financial media. She has a Master’s degree in Finance and Data Analytics from The University of Sydney Business School.