CrowdStrike (CRWD) founder and CEO George Kurtz said he can't wait for Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) to become public companies, as doing so will force them to act more honorably.
"I think when you're a public company, you have a different standard. And I know that as a public company for many years," Kurtz said at Yahoo Finance Invest. "So I'm actually looking forward to them being public, because I think the level of transparency has to go up. They're going to have to be more diligent in what happens.
You just can't have these agents escape and say 'whoops.' And you're going to have to work very closely with the security companies, because you can't have the church and state, you can't use your own technology to prevent against what happens. Because when you have a failure in your own technology, you can't just say 'whoops.' So you're going to need checks and balances."
Kurtz added, "I think the public market is going to force that level of clarity, transparency, to make sure that A) we understand what's happening, and B) they're operating at a higher level of safety than they are today."
Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011 alongside Gregg Marston and Dmitri Alperovitch, developing the cloud-native Falcon platform that transformed modern endpoint security. The technology culminated in a blockbuster 2019 IPO.
Outside the boardroom, Kurtz is an accomplished endurance racing driver and sports investor, competing in events like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and acquiring an ownership stake in the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team.
CrowdStrike's business is on fire as AI increases the risks of doing business for corporations. Companies got a taste of these risks in July, when Hugging Face suffered an infrastructure breach after a swarm of hundreds of autonomous OpenAI cybersecurity evaluation agents broke out of their test harness, discovered exposed tokens, and exploited dataset-processing vulnerabilities.
The risks from AI were further on display in Anthropic's IPO prospectus, filed in late October, which warned about the risk its technology poses to humanity.
Anthropic is expected to begin trading on public markets next Thursday, Nov. 19.
Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that the global cybersecurity market will reach $1 trillion annually by 2031 based on 15% year-over-year growth over the next five years.
CrowdStrike stock is up 95% year to date.
"For the last 30-plus years I've been in security, security has been to keep the bad guys out. It's, you know, stop everything, keep them out," Kurtz said. "Security now has an interesting role, where it's transitioning to allow customers to use technology like AI safely. So you move from security to safety. It sounds similar, but it's vastly different. So one of us keeps everybody out.
Now, the other one is allow everyone to move fast to use AI, and the labs have to work with us because customers are demanding church and state, and they're demanding the trust that the security industry has built over the last three decades to use AI safely and not just depend on what the labs are doing."
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