It's not about being disrupted by AI, but about mastering AI! Leading cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike (CRWD.US) exceeded expectations in all aspects of performance.

Focusing on the field of cybersecurity, the super giant CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. (CRWD.US) announced its financial performance for the fourth quarter of the 2026 fiscal year ending on January 31st and the latest performance outlook for the next fiscal quarter and the 2027 fiscal year on Wednesday morning Beijing time. Undoubtedly, the strong financial data from CrowdStrike and the better-than-expected future outlook are enough to significantly weaken the extreme pessimistic narrative of "AI will rapidly disrupt cybersecurity software, crushing the growth logic of existing cybersecurity platform vendors." CrowdStrike has effectively told investors through its strong financial performance data that the AI-driven cybersecurity super tool introduced by Anthropic is not sufficient to pose a major threat to platform-type cybersecurity hegemony. For the fourth quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, CrowdStrike's total revenue was approximately $13.05 billion, a significant increase of 23% compared to the previous year, exceeding Wall Street analysts' average expectation of about $13 billion. Subscription revenue reached around $12.42 billion, a 23% year-on-year growth. The company's non-GAAP adjusted earnings per share for the fourth quarter were $1.12, a 38% year-on-year increase, and higher than analysts' expectations of about $1.10. As of January 31, 2026, the company's Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) saw a significant year-on-year growth of 24%, reaching $5.25 billion, with a net ARR of $330.7 million added in the fourth quarter, a record-breaking 47% year-on-year growth, far exceeding analysts' expectations of about $300 million. In other key performance indicators for the fourth quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, non-GAAP operating profit was approximately $326 million, a 45% year-on-year increase; Falcon Fle accounted for about $1.69 billion in ARR, a 120%+ year-on-year growth; Flex customers exceeded 1,600; Cloud Security ARR exceeded $800 million, a 35%+ year-on-year growth; Next-Gen SIEM (LogScale) ARR reached $585 million, a significant 75% year-on-year increase; Next-Gen Identity ARR was approximately $520 million, a 34% increase. In terms of the highly anticipated performance outlook, for the first quarter of the 2027 fiscal year, CrowdStrike management expects ARR to be in the range of $5.5018 billion to $5.5038 billion, total revenue to be in the range of approximately $1.36 billion to $1.64 billion, slightly higher than the average Wall Street analysts' expectation of about $1.36 billion, with an adjusted non-GAAP EPS expectation range of $1.06 to $1.07, basically in line with analysts' average expectations. For the full-year outlook for the 2027 fiscal year, CrowdStrike management expects ARR to be in the range of $6.4658 billion to $6.5164 billion, total revenue in the range of approximately $58.676 billion to $59.276 billion, higher than the average Wall Street analysts' expectation of about $58.6 billion to $58.7 billion, with an adjusted non-GAAP EPS expectation range of $4.78 to $4.90, slightly higher than analysts' average expectations. In summary, to summarize CrowdStrike's latest financial report in one sentence: this is a "Q4 double beat, much stronger ARR/net new ARR, Q1 performance outlook generally surpassing expectations, full-year performance exceeding expectations" across-the-board strong financial report. Recently, the well-known Wall Street investment firm Wedbush released a research report, stating that channel research data shows that companies have not canceled cybersecurity orders due to AI substitution concerns. On the contrary, the AI-driven threat escalation is driving companies to adopt advanced defense systems such as the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. Wedbush maintains an "outperforming the market" rating for this cybersecurity service provider's stock and has a target price of up to $600. Additionally, CrowdStrike is expected to be a core winner on the IVES AI 30 list compiled by Wedbush for the year 2026. As of the closing of the U.S. stock market on Tuesday, CrowdStrike's stock price was at $391.42. The pessimistic market sentiment of "AI disrupting everything" has significantly impacted sectors such as software. In the eyes of top Wall Street institutions such as Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., the current U.S. stock market looks more like in a high probability stage of "experiencing a round of volatility/dip washing, attempting to break through the 7,000-point mark and achieve a new bull market." Before achieving a stronger bull market trajectory, U.S. stocks may undergo significant downward adjustments due to negative combinations such as the GEO Group Inc. political turmoil and tariff storms, as well as the pessimistic market sentiment of "AI disrupting everything." Following the recent failure in breaking the 7,000-point mark, the "Anthropic storm" that devastated software stocks is still fermenting in global stock markets the panic selling sentiment brought by the fear of "AI disrupting everything" still exists. Coupled with the cooling trend of fund outflows and the major political risks at GEO Group Inc., the S&P 500 index is more likely to experience a period of "painful path" in the short term. With a wave of innovative AI intelligent agents focused on delegate workflows being released, it is possible that they will disrupt one traditional industry after another and suppress pricing power in the broader economy. Since the beginning of February, worries about the "great AI tide" compressing business profits, disrupting employment, and leading to deflationary impacts have quickly spread to various traditional economic sectors such as software, private credit, real estate services, and insurance. The pessimistic market expectations of "AI disrupting everything" have been impacting various industries like dominoes, from software, SaaS, PE, to insurance, wealth management, real estate, property management, and even logistics sectors taking turns experiencing significant declines. As a result, profit expectations have dropped significantly, and investors have accelerated selling potential "losers." The pessimistic view of "AI disrupting everything" since February has mainly been due to growing concerns in the market that AI-agents like Claude and OpenClaw (formerly known as Clawdbot, Moltbot) are exploding and spreading virus-like automated workflows, which may weaken the entire software empire relying on SaaS seat subscription revenue model. This selling pressure has quickly spread to industries such as insurance, real estate, truck transportation, and any other industries resembling seat revenue models or labor-intensive business models the market believes these industries will be completely disrupted by AI. The selling pressure led by the "Anthropic AI storm" has intensified since late February, when Anthropic launched Claude Code Security an AI-driven network security vulnerability scanner. This tool resulted in a significant 8% to 10% drop in network security companies including CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, and Okta in a single trading day. Subsequently, after Anthropic claimed that its Claude Code tool could help enterprises achieve automated processing of traditional programming languages running on IBM systems under AI intelligent agents with extremely low barriers, American tech giant IBM experienced its most drastic single-day stock price decline in over 25 years. CrowdStrike effectively refutes the pessimistic narrative with strong performance and outlook. During a period when the pessimistic narrative of "AI disrupting everything" has been wreaking havoc on the US stock market, which leans towards digital assets and light assets, the cybersecurity powerhouse CrowdStrike effectively refutes this narrative with its strong performance. If AI agents were truly capable of rapidly "disintermediating" platform-type cybersecurity leaders like CrowdStrike in the short term, investors would first see a sharp slowdown in net new ARR, deteriorating platform penetration rates, slowing expansion of adjacent modules, and conservative full-year performance guidance. However, what investors are currently seeing is quite the opposite record-breaking net new ARR, strong Flex expansion, continued penetration of 6+, 7+, and 8+ modules, and high-growth platform layer businesses such as Cloud/SIEM/Identity. Amidst the plummeting of CrowdStrike's stock price on February 22 due to the "Anthropic AI storm," CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz stated in a LinkedIn post, "Artificial intelligence is powerful. It is transformative. It will absolutely make our security better. But AI has not eliminated the strong demand for cybersecurity platforms among users. Instead, it has significantly increased security." Even as human society fully transitions into the AI era, there are certain positions that are becoming increasingly popular, such as FDE roles that involve "embedding models into enterprise workflows," which have seen a 42-fold increase in demand between 2023 and 2025. Ultimately, stock market valuation may not be a simple case of "software loses, AI wins." Real positive developments may be concentrated in two main themes: the first being AI deployment and governance infrastructure, which includes platform-integrated service providers that can truly run AI for enterprises, such as cloud computing and model platforms, network security platforms, data governance, identity and access management, audit/security, observability, workflow orchestration, and more comprehensive services that can truly enable enterprises to run AI, such as CrowdStrike, Microsoft Corporation, Oracle Corporation, ServiceNow, and SAP. When AI significantly enhances optimization efficiency and lowers marginal decision costs, platform software companies like CrowdStrike, Microsoft Corporation, and SAP may experience a "throughput enhancement + stronger unit economics" positive feedback loop, rather than being completely replaced. The second theme is the most intense race in the global market logic AI data center computing power and power supply chain. Kurtz mentioned in the company's recently released financial report, "The AI revolution has created immense growth opportunities for CrowdStrike, and our technology, team, and ecosystem are all capable of continuing to succeed." Looking at the underlying IT/security architecture logic, AI will not reduce security demands; instead, it will expand security demands from endpoint security to identity, cloud, data, workflow, model, agent, and browser runtime. A recent threat report from CrowdStrike provides strong industrial evidence attacks driven by AI technology have increased by 89% year-on-year, with the average breakout time compressed to just 29 minutes. This means that attackers are using AI to enhance reconnaissance, credential theft, evasion of detection, and lateral movement efficiency. If the defense side does not have unified telemetry, real-time correlation analysis, automated investigation, and response capabilities, they are unable to keep up. Therefore, Kurtz has been emphasizing the new risks brought by AI agents, prompt injection, and AI-powered hacking tools. In engineering terms, this is quite the opposite of the recent market concerns that "AI renders security software worthless" AI automates attacks, generalizes identities, and makes accesses dynamic, which actually raises the necessity of platform-centric security hubs like CrowdStrike that actively integrate cutting-edge AI technology. As a result, CrowdStrike benefits from the wave of training, but more deeply and enduringly benefits from the wave of reasoning/AgentAI intelligence democratization.