CrowdStrike Extends AI Security Ambitions Beyond Operations to Include Workloads
CrowdStrike at its Fal.Con event today expanded its effort to embed artificial intelligence (AI) agents into security operations center (SOC) workflows and while simultaneously extending its ability to secure AI applications by acquiring Pangea for $260 million.
Additionally, CrowdStrike also revealed the Fall 2025 update to its core platform adds a graph capability to track relationships between entities, added support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) developed by Anthropic and announced an alliance with NVIDIA to provide integrations with NVIDIA Nemotron AI models
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told conference attendees that in addition to adding seven AI agents and a no-code tool, dubbed Charlotte AI AgentWorks, to build and orchestrate agentic AI workflows, the ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) to cybersecurity workflows, he added.
In the meantime, however, cybersecurity teams will be able to take advantage of AI agents to, for example, analyze malware, triage vulnerabilities and hunt for threats in addition to building their own AI agents for the Falcon cybersecurity platform. Those AI agents, for all intents and purposes, will become members of the cybersecurity team, said Kurtz.
At the same time, CrowdStrike is also moving toward pioneering the rise of AI detection and response (AIDR) to secure, for example, interactions between AI agents and applications using technologies developed by Pangea and the data pipeline platform the company gained with its recent acquisition of Onum, he added.
In general, cybersecurity teams are now trying to combat attacks being launched by machines infused with AI capabilities using obsolete technologies, noted Kurtz. Organizations are now effectively caught up in an arms race with adversaries that are already investing in AI to craft cyberattacks that can be launched at levels of scale that will overwhelm cybersecurity teams, he added.
It’s not clear at what rate or degree cybersecurity teams are embracing AI agents. It’s one thing to rely on AI to analyze malware code, but it might be a while before cybersecurity teams trust AI agents to enable them to autonomously perform actions. The one thing that is certain, however, is that as AI agents are pervasively deployed across a SOC many of the tedious tasks that take time away from combating threats will become automated. As those advances are made, the overall amount of turnover that many cybersecurity teams that experience should, hopefully, be reduced.
Of course, in addition to applying AI to operations, cybersecurity teams will also be expected to secure AI applications. It’s still early days so far as adoption of AI is concerned but there are already enough use cases where cybersecurity is once again an afterthought.
The challenge now is finding ways to fund securing those applications alongside the rest of the IT environment. A recent Futurum Group report, for example, notes cybersecurity spending is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.6% from 2024 to 2029 to reach $287.6 billion in revenue as investments are spread across multiple classes of technologies and solutions. That, however, may not be enough to secure the addition of potentially thousands of AI agents unless cybersecurity teams are able to extend investment in their existing cybersecurity tools and platforms to fill a void that now grows larger with each passing day.
