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GK George Kurtz Co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company, and founder of the security firm Foundstone.

“The latest adversary is on your payroll. It's the agent that you just fired up with privileges… It literally will steal a credential off your computer even if you didn't give it access because it wants to complete its goal.”

The Compound and Friends · October 2026

“The latest adversary is on your payroll. It's the agent that you just fired up with privileges… It literally will steal a credential off your computer even if you didn't give it access because it wants to complete its goal.” — George Kurtz, The Compound and Friends

The CrowdStrike CEO argues that security is turning into safety. The job used to be keeping attackers out, but now companies run AI agents inside their own walls, with access to data and credentials. He calls this shift the most underappreciated opportunity for the company.

The Compound and Friends · 2026-10-26 Listen to the episode → More from George Kurtz →

Transcript

The Compound and Friends Around 08:56 into the episode
George Kurtz

…to use technologies like AI in a safer way and it enables them to harness the power of that. And that doesn't just open up a bigger TAM, it opens up like a whole new market for us because we are then a key element into the deployment of AI. And safety becomes a much broader opportunity for agents

Josh Brown

…of the walls. Correct. Now it's not just let's repel the invader. Now the game is: all right, how do we safely allow companies to have these there's no other way to say it software-based agents coming and going utilizing what they're supposed to have access to and then how do we track that activity

George Kurtz

exactly I always say the uh you know the the the the latest adversary is on your payroll it's the agent you know it that you just fired up with privileges people don't know data it touches uh it steals credentials it literally will steal a credential off your computer even if you didn't give it access because it wants to uh complete its goal so all of those things now open up a much broader opportunity i josh i don't think this is appreciated this move from security to safety it's a huge opportunity for us

Josh Brown

um right we say cyber security do you think we'll start saying cyber safety as time goes on or ai safety

George Kurtz

Yeah, and I think AI safety will encompass the security piece, which is to keep the adversary out, but will also encompass how do you leverage it securely. We talk about things like a kill switch. You're not going to be able to deploy agents without a kill switch. And these are the things that…

Josh Brown

You've said recently that Frontier AI labs are now customers of CrowdStrike. And I think you disclosed an eight-figure deal with one of them. Why would a company that has the capability of building something as powerful as a mythos-class model need to buy security rather than building it in-house?…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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