Cybersecurity firms have taken a beating recently, another victim of the AI doom trade. This has been fuelled by suggestions that the leading AI software may soon be able to spin up a vibe-coded CrowdStrike, the leader in its field. Mania and structural change can be difficult to tell apart, as there is often some signal amongst the noise. AI is definitely a revolutionary technology, and the rate of progress, particularly within coding abilities, has been profound. This has culminated in a broad software sector sell-off that appears to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater by lumping in the cybersecurity firms. Whilst your non-technical son-in-law may have been able to vibe-code his own to-do list app, cybersecurity is a problem that is at a much deeper and more difficult to replicate level of the infrastructure stack.

CrowdStrike founder and CEO, George Kurtz, got this point across in an undeniably hilarious way on LinkedIn last weekend. He asked Claude Code, an application by Anthropic that has been a major catalyst for the software/cyber-sell off, to do exactly what the market fears. Build me a tool to replace CrowdStrike.

Here is a snippet from his post:

Prompt 1:
In Claude code, build me a tool to replace CrowdStrike

Answer:
“I appreciate the ambition, George, but I have to be straightforward: building a replacement for CrowdStrike isn’t something I can do here, and it wouldn’t be responsible for me to suggest otherwise.

CrowdStrike is a massive platform built by thousands of engineers over a decade-plus. Its core capabilities include real-time kernel-level endpoint monitoring across millions of devices, a proprietary threat intelligence graph built from trillions of security events, lightweight agents running on every OS with sub-second detection, automated incident response and remediation, and a 24/7 threat hunting operation. That’s not something you can replicate with a script — it’s an infrastructure product.”

It is clear that AI is going to change the world. But that does not mean that the tried and true competitive advantages of old are no longer relevant. The leading cybersecurity firms have the benefit of the widest customer bases, granting them the vastest datasets, which are vital for improving their best-in-class security systems. Add to this a cybersecurity market expanding precisely because of AI, with each new agent requiring its own defence against a growing volume of attacks, and the picture becomes clear: for best-in-breed firms like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, staples of High Street’s Wealth Warriors Fund, AI is a tailwind, not a headwind. Just as it was in mid-2024, when CrowdStrike’s share price crashed 45%, Warren Buffett’s wisdom to be “fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” feels apt once more.