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No Priors · 3 min · Oct 22, 2026

Security models win on cost, data and customer trust

George Kurtz

President & CEO, CrowdStrike

Co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011 and leads it as president and CEO, after founding Foundstone.

  • Sarah GuoHost · Founder, Conviction

    Ex-Greylock partner; early investor in Cognition, Harvey and Mistral.

  • Elad GilHost · CEO, Gil & Co

    Investor in Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase and Anthropic; co-founded Color.

About this segment

Kurtz says CrowdStrike’s security models cost far less and draw on years of proprietary threat data. That focus also helps customers keep sensitive security information under their control.

From “The New Apex Predator: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on Adversaries Armed With AI Agents”, Oct 22, 2026. Watch the full episode

“it probably costs you about $10. Ours is like three cents. So there is a huge cost difference”
George Kurtzat 19:43 · No Priors19:43

Takeaways

  1. A frontier cyber model can cost about $10 per remediation; theirs costs three cents.
  2. CrowdStrike post-trains models with more than a decade of security data.
  3. Customers can choose frontier or CrowdStrike models and control where data goes.
Watch 3:28 from 18:28

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 18:28Security models win on cost, data and customer trust3:28

  2. 28:43AI attacks raise the pace, not create a new attack class2:51Up next
  3. 38:25Large companies need startup-speed teams and clear moats3:31
  4. 2 more moments in the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 18:41

    That was going to be one of my big questions about your labs investment here, which is, I think, a reasonable question to ask about any model. effort is like, why isn't that just a frontier? You know, you work with OpenAI and Anthropic capability. These labs, of course, they realize the importance of security and then they have these programs for like vetted defenders, be it like Daybreak or sort of Mythos Access.

  2. 19:11

    Why is that insufficient? I mean, you have a capability argument based on, you know, structurally that you think is important for an independent security vendor here? Yeah, I think there's a few things there. So first, what the labs are creating is incredible. I mean, where they've come from, what they created, it's unbelievable, right? And we also want to make that available to our customers. So the general theory is if you have a safe mind and you want to leverage a frontier model, great, we can leverage that. If you want to leverage our models, fantastic. Our models will be significantly cheaper. So just to give you an example, um, so for general remediation, if you use like, uh, uh, the highest caliber frontier cyber model, it probably costs you about $10. Ours is like three cents. So there is a huge cost difference, um, which is important.

  3. 20:04

    But then when you look at, you know, our model, because of the way we've post trained it on our data, a huge difference is we have the data. Like there is no Reddit of CrowdStrike security data. You can create synthetic data, but it's really not the same as what we have. We've got 15 years, well, maybe a little bit less because I started 15 years ago, but, you know, call it over a decade of security data, including from our MDR, our managed detection response service, that has all of the sort of threat and vulnerability pairings and sort of the attack chains. And we've basically created this massive amount of data that we use to train it. So we're getting great results on it. And I think it is very focused because of the post-training.

  4. 20:48

    You know, again, it's not going to cure cancer, but it's going to give you great results for security. That's number one. Number two is there is a safety and trust aspect. We have all of the data from our customers. We've been entrusted with that for the last 15 years. We know how to protect it. We know what they want. We know how they want to use it. There's a real concern by customers they don't want all this data going out to the labs they don't want all their sensitive information they don't want it their information being trained on right so we and provide a way to get them the trust and security that they want for their own security program. And this sort of concept of AI sovereignty is very important to many of our customers.

  5. 21:32

    So again, we're not saying exclude the labs because they have incredible technology, but you can pick what you want or you can route between the various models, but ultimately we want to give customers choice. I think you've also talked a little bit about