Anthropic’s new tool wipes down billions from CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler, Okta stocks; company says: We also…
Cybersecurity stocks took a beating on Friday after Anthropic unveiled Claude Code Security—a new AI-powered tool that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests patches, all built into its Claude Code platform on the web. The announcement sent shockwaves through a sector already bruised by months of AI-driven disruption fears.The damage was swift and broad-based. CrowdStrike, one of the biggest names in endpoint protection, dropped around 8%. Cloudflare slid 8%, Okta fell over 9%, SailPoint shed roughly 9%, and Zscaler declined about 5.5%. Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet weren’t spared either, slipping 2–4% during the session. The Global X Cybersecurity ETF closed at its lowest level since November 2023, down nearly 5%. Combined, the sell-off wiped billions in market value across the sector in a single trading day—the latest in a string of AI-triggered routs that have hammered software stocks this year.
What spooked Wall Street about an AI tool in research preview
Claude Code Security doesn’t just scan for known patterns like traditional static analysis tools. It reads code the way a human security researcher would—tracing data flows, understanding how components interact, and flagging subtle logic flaws that rule-based scanners typically miss. Every finding goes through a multi-stage verification process before it reaches a human analyst, and nothing gets patched without developer approval.What really rattled investors: Anthropic said its Claude Opus 4.6 model had already found over 500 vulnerabilities in production open-source codebases during internal testing—bugs that had survived decades of expert review. The company said in its blog post that it also uses Claude to review its own code and has “found it to be extremely effective at securing Anthropic’s systems.” The goal with Claude Code Security, Anthropic added, is to make “those same defensive capabilities more widely available.““There’s been steady selling in software, and today it’s security that’s getting a mini-flash crash on a headline,” said Dennis Dick, head trader at Triple D Trading. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF is now down more than 23% this year, on pace for its worst quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis.
Is this an overreaction or a preview of what’s coming
Jefferies analyst Joseph Gallo expects cybersecurity will ultimately benefit from AI but warned that “headline headwinds are likely to intensify before clarity & cyber inflection from securing AI materializes.”The tool is currently available only as a limited research preview for Enterprise and Team customers, with expedited access for open-source maintainers. It targets code auditing and vulnerability detection—not real-time endpoint protection, identity management, or zero-trust networking, which remain the core businesses of the companies that got hammered hardest.
