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

“Instead of the nation-state being the apex predator, it's the agent-state. And we've totally collapsed the pyramid because what we saw and what we reported on is that the same unsophisticated threat actor is executing the same high-level attack as a nation state because they're using agents.”

The Compound and Friends · October 2026

“Instead of the nation-state being the apex predator, it's the agent-state. And we've totally collapsed the pyramid because what we saw and what we reported on is that the same unsophisticated threat actor is executing the same high-level attack as a nation state because they're using agents.” — George Kurtz, The Compound and Friends

Kurtz on CrowdStrike's new research into AI-agent intrusions, which he says are rising exponentially. The old "pyramid of pain" had many unsophisticated hacktivists at the bottom and a few skilled nation-states at the top. Agents and off-the-shelf skills now give amateurs nation-state capabilities.

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

Transcript

The Compound and Friends Around 13:04 into the episode
George Kurtz

…data and distilling it down. Those are all opportunities where we both work together. But sort of this runtime, real-time protection becomes really, really important when all these attacks are coming at you. So that's the way we would look at it. And we've had good relationships with the labs over

Josh Brown

…relatively inexperienced are able to utilize these skills and do a lot more damage than historically sort of an amateur hacker might be able to do because of the power of the agents themselves. So talk a little bit about the importance of this research and what you want people to take away from it.

George Kurtz

Sure. So the number one thing that you should take away is it is an exponential increase in what we're seeing with agentic attacks. And this shouldn't be a surprise given everything that happened over the last six to eight months. We're seeing it now, like what happened eight months ago, we're seeing now. I think what's interesting is we've covered a variety of threat actors from like China, nation state, Russia, et cetera, to sort of maybe less sophisticated players in the market. And this is one of those areas where I've talked about this pyramid of pain. And we used to refer to the pyramid of pain of like a pyramid, and at the bottom was hacktivists, right? So they were the, you had the most number of them, but the least sophisticated. Same whales, right? Everything, right? You know, people like political motivations, et cetera, they would just break into sites and cause havoc. In the middle of this pyramid, you had more sophistication, but less, and that was e-crime, e-criminals. And at the top, you'd have nation-state, so you'd have the least amount, but the most…

Josh Brown

This is like how the Heath Ledger Joker robbed the bank. None of the other bank robbers who are dressed as clowns only knew their own job.

George Kurtz

Right.

Josh Brown

So, the guy says, No, no, no, I'm supposed to shoot the bus driver. Like, they don't see the hand that's coordinating all of them. Correct. It sounds like a similar model.

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