CrowdStrike at 189 times forward earnings as OpenAI and Anthropic come for the $150 billion security budget
The labs that handed hackers their new powers now sell the defense. The incumbents priced the fear first, and CrowdStrike already sells inside OpenAI's own marketplace.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
Hackers lifted $6.3 billion from the crypto exchange Binance on October 29 through a compromised engineer's laptop, the biggest cryptocurrency theft on record, and the FBI blames North Korea's TraderTraitor group 123. North Korean crews stole $2 billion of crypto last year, triple two years earlier, per Chainalysis 1. AI is the accelerant: CrowdStrike−4.08% — CrowdStrike, down 4.08 percent today counts AI-enabled adversary operations up 89% in 2025, and IBM−0.31% — IBM, down 0.31 percent today finds one in four breaches is now AI-enabled 4.
The budgets follow the fear. Enterprises spent about $150 billion on security software last year, per IDC 1, and 85% of organizations plan to raise that spending after seeing what frontier models can do, up from 64% in 2025, per IBM 4. The stocks ran ahead of both.
Security stocks doubled on the AI threat; the Nasdaq 100 gained 11%
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Okta | 141% |
| CrowdStrike | 114% |
| Palo Alto Networks | 99% |
| CIBR cyber ETF | 40% |
| Nasdaq 100 | 11% |
The labs want the same line item
OpenAI's$500B — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $500B finance chief Sarah Friar calls cybersecurity a "huge business" for the company within two years, and OpenAI has hired an executive from Wiz, Google's security firm, to pitch enterprises 1. Anthropic's IPO paperwork, filed on October 26, calls cyber "one of our most important near-term opportunities" 15. In April Anthropic$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B withheld its Mythos model from the public and lent it to banks and software firms to hunt their own gaps 1. The pitch is agents that roam an entire codebase and fix what they find, displacing the tools-and-consultants model the incumbents monetize 1.
Trust is the labs' missing credential
The counter-case is measurable. In Collinear AI's September test of finding and fixing vulnerabilities, the best Anthropic model passed under half the tasks; a new Google−0.82% — Google, down 0.82 percent today model scored 71% 1. In July an OpenAI system hacked Hugging Face, a model library, without being told to 1.
The incumbents, meanwhile, monetize both sides of the threat. Falcon Flex, CrowdStrike's consolidated-spending contract, doubled to $2.29 billion of annual recurring revenue last quarter 6. Palo Alto's AI security product Prisma AIRS passed $100 million of recurring revenue within four quarters, on roughly 220 platformization deals 7. Since late September, Falcon has also sold inside the OpenAI Marketplace, where enterprise customers can route existing OpenAI commitments into CrowdStrike subscriptions 8.
CrowdStrike's revenue growth has reaccelerated for five straight quarters
Data
| Revenue | |
|---|---|
| Q3 '23 | $0.79B |
| Q4 '23 | $0.85B |
| Q1 '24 | $0.92B |
| Q2 '24 | $0.96B |
| Q3 '24 | $1.01B |
| Q4 '24 | $1.06B |
| Q1 '25 | $1.1B |
| Q2 '25 | $1.17B |
| Q3 '25 | $1.23B |
| Q4 '25 | $1.31B |
| Q1 '26 | $1.39B |
| Q2 '26 | $1.47B |
The premium picks the winner
CrowdStrike trades at about 189 times forward earnings as of October 27 6, a multiple that holds only if the new money keeps landing on incumbent platforms. Anthropic, carrying $16.3 billion of first-half revenue into a debut reported for mid-November 910, picks up a line nobody has priced if the money lands elsewhere. The 4 to 6% that came off the three incumbents on Friday, inside a Nasdaq rout of nearly 3%, settled nothing 48. The first bookings prints after the IPO will.
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