Key Points
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Concerns about AI’s impact on jobs and data centers’ environmental and financial impact have soured Americans on AI.
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These strong negative feelings have been amplified by concerns about the security and safety risks of AI agents.
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Increasing scrutiny of AI safety in the lead-up to Anthropic and OpenAI’s likely IPOs will benefit cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike.
- 10 stocks we like better than CrowdStrike ›
Cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) has had an amazing 2026. Its shares were already up 61.4% year-to-date before its latest earnings report on Aug. 26, which I predicted would send the stock soaring.
I was right: the company’s shares are now up 78.2% for the year to $211.92 per share as of this writing.
And I think they’re destined to go higher. Much, much higher.
If you bought 25 shares of CrowdStrike at the current price, it would cost you $5,298. But I think that by the end of next year, those 25 shares would be worth at least $250 apiece, for this 1 simple reason.
Everyone is fascinated by AI doomsday scenarios
This week, the internet had a collective freakout over a social media post by a departing Anthropic employee.
On Tuesday, AI researcher Jacob Coxon posted the following on social media site X:
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
Those “more thoughts” included the assertion that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” In response, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed:
Jacob is correct here–we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. https://t.co/QAIHiFP3QZ
— Evan Hubinger (@EvanHub) September 9, 2026
These posts have collectively received nearly 200 million views as of this writing and have been cited by major news outlets and late night TV hosts. But whether the prediction is accurate or not — and I really hope it’s not — it tells us something important about how AI is perceived.
AI is increasingly seen as a dangerous security threat
There’s a psychological phenomenon called “the fork tail effect,” which says that if you see someone exhibiting a negative trait, you’re more likely to believe they possess other negative traits (the same way you might assume someone with a fork tail was devilish). The fork-tail effect is in full swing for AI.
Americans were already concerned about AI having a negative impact on their jobs and communities. Opposition to AI data centers has surged over the past year. This has made it easier to see recent events like OpenAI’s security breach of Hugging Face and Coxon’s and Hubinger’s X posts as evidence that AI is dangerous and threatening.
And when companies believe they’re facing a dangerous, threatening adversary, they tend to spend more on protecting themselves. Already this year, CrowdStrike’s revenue has surged, in part over concerns about AI-enabled cyberattacks.
With IPOs by OpenAI and Anthropic expected this fall, AI will be even more prominent in the news. That means even more focus in the media and popular culture on whether AI is dangerous. That will encourage companies to spend more to protect themselves, and evidence shows they’re spending more on CrowdStrike’s products and services.
That should result in higher spend from CrowdStrike’s existing customers and an influx of new customers, which should boost revenue, profits, and share price.
How much CrowdStrike’s shares should benefit
I predict that this intense focus on AI safety will boost CrowdStrike’s shares by at least 20% from their current levels by the end of next year, and probably sooner. That would result in a price of about $250/share.
The potential risk is that if CrowdStrike’s software fails to prevent an AI agent from committing a high-profile cybersecurity breach against a customer, the company’s shares would almost certainly drop significantly.
But if my prediction that CrowdStrike’s stock will reach $250/share is correct, the 25 shares of CrowdStrike that cost us $5,298 today would be worth at least $6,250 by next year. And if any further high-profile AI security breaches make the news, or better yet, if CrowdStrike prevents a major AI cyberattack on a customer, those shares could go even higher.
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John Bromels has positions in CrowdStrike. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CrowdStrike. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.