Phone and call now to see what your case could be worth.
CRWD, CrowdStrike, on a total tear, hitting a new all-time high yesterday. It looks like it's going to have a new one today, up nearly 180% in the past six months — not bad. The company continuing to benefit from AI-driven cybersecurity demand. Joining us now — great honor — CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. George, first of all, thank you for showing up, because I've got to tell you, we're going to put some stories to bed today. We're going to be able to make it so it's not Stephen King, it's not The Stand — it's an engineering problem, and it can be beaten. I'm talking about the AI craziness that we hear from a couple of companies. Where are you on things like NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform, which made me feel pretty good, and I thought that it became an engineering problem with that?
Well, we're obviously part of that. We work very closely with NVIDIA, and when we think about what an agent does, an agent is a program that actually runs and touches other files. It touches data files, it takes action. And what's important is the model providers are focused on trying to build guardrails around how the model actually thinks. But when you put it in production, you need to see what it actually does — you need to understand its actions. And one of the things that we focused on is building the flight recorder for what these agents are doing. You have to have traceability on what they're actually doing, and you have to tie that into the ability to enforce it, which is what we've collaborated on with NVIDIA. So this is a solvable problem. You just have to have the right partnership and technologies coming together to build safety for companies that are using these agents.
Okay, so you've got people on one side who say it's a solvable problem, and then people on the other side who say we've got to slow things down because we have no idea what can happen. Why are the people in the latter camp so ascendant right now in the discourse of the general populace — not where you are right now, but the gen pop — particularly ahead of an election?
Well, look, I think there's a lot of different motivations out there of who wants to do what and slow things down. I think when you look at AI in general, it's been a foundational technology. I mean, it's the greatest sea change that I've seen in my lifetime and certainly my technology career. So you've got to be able to harness it. This isn't about racing — you don't slow things down. You want to have the greatest amount of safety so that you can go faster.
Faster. And I think this is an important topic. Obviously, safety and security is important, but you've got to do it in the right way. And it doesn't mean that you have to basically slow everything down and then give our adversaries, like China and others, an advantage ahead of us. So I think this is why folks are coming together on one side versus the other saying it's solvable — we just have to do it in the right way, and we've got to do it without a massive amount of regulation.
Well, then what is it? What's solvable? I want to try and understand this because you hear different things from different people. Bill Gates did an interview I listened to last week talking about, we need a supervisory level across the world, given the open models — not just the closed models that we all talk about here. So what actually would work?
Well, what actually works is, let's start with the right standards. So if you look at what the organizations are focused on now, it's self-regulation. But things like the NIST standards, which come out of the US government, they're working on updated ones for AI, which is basically focused on how do we build and train models and put guardrails around them. And then you have board oversight, you've got external auditors — those are all great steps, fantastic. But then when you put it in production, you have to see what it actually does. Think about a plane: you build a plane, there's certain standards, then you put it into production, you fly it, and when something happens, you have to go back to the black box — what did it do, what really happened. So there's runtime control.
You've also got a federal regulator called the FAA that's looking over your shoulder all the time.
You do. But I think at the end of the day, we can wait for the next five years to get AI models out, or we can be competitive and have self-policing.
Yeah, but we don't want the plane to crash, George.
That's why you've got regulation around those planes, because you've got people involved in actually creating them. But from a plane manufacturer's perspective, it takes years to get something certified. Do we want to wait five years to have a model certified?
Well, yes, because in five years there are people who have been in the scrum who say that we could all be dead, which is a suboptimal situation.
Nonsense, Jim. We're not going to be dead in 2030 with a 10% chance.
Well, then why say it? Why do you think people just say it? Because it's like they're novelists.
