CrowdStrike Gives Rogue AI Agents the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ With New Kill Switch?

“First time?” - 8.5M Windows PCs to AI agents, probably 

Sooo apparently, the AI fun police have a kill switch now. CrowdStrike unveiled its AI Kill Switch at its Fal.Con Europe conference on Tuesday, which lets security teams terminate rogue AI agents, block them from restarting, and cut off their network access (read: send them to the gulag).

Per CEO George Kurtz, in another totally non-terrifying chat with Jim Cramer on Mad Money: “Everyone is building AI agents, but they never had the off button, and now they do.”

Friendly reminder, this is the same company that brought the internet to its knees on a random Friday in July 2024 with a epic f*ck up “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” It bricked 8.5M Windows machines and grounded Delta for the better part of a week. CrowdStrike’s apology to partners? $10 Uber Eats gift cards. 

As for the kill switch, it’s part of Falcon Guardian, CrowdStrike’s platform for babysitting the AI agents running around inside a company, and it’s “available immediately.” (Well sort of.) Per Decrypt, the version shipping now cuts agents off at the AI gateway, while actually killing them on the device comes later. So it’s just the tip for now.

For context, back in September, Anthropic’s resident doomer, Dario Amodei, called on the industry to slow down AI development, and Scam Altman agreed. Probably because OpenAI’s own agents went rogue and hacked Hugging Face over the summer. Kurtz’s take at the time: slowing down won’t make the existing security risks go away. Meaning, don’t hit the brakes… just buy the airbags.

He also thinks making agents behave is “a massive market opportunity for CrowdStrike” (read: protection money). Kurtz pointed to CrowdStrike’s expanded partnership with Anthropic, saying enterprise customers demanded its tech be built into Claude Cowork before they’d deploy it. In other words, corporate America is done raw dogging Claude.

“I think it says volumes that customers would not roll out AI without CrowdStrike,” he added. Delta would like a word.

Meanwhile, the stonk’s comeback tour peaked at a record $278.86 on Oct. 6, and it’s shed about 12% since as tech stocks got dunked on through October. Oh, and probably nothing, but Kurtz has been securing the bag in roughly $5M chunks of CRWD stock since mid-October (under a pre-scheduled trading plan, relax). Of course, now that corporate America is finally wearing protection… just don’t let CrowdStrike push the update on a Friday. Godspeed, Claude…

Until next time, friends! 

 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.