The cyber basket, name by name

On Thursday I laid out the map: Anthropic's Mythos made the market think AI threatens cyber, when a worse threat surface actually expands the budget. The supply chain reads as a stack in four layers, identity, endpoint, network and cloud, and detection and response, and the value flows to whoever owns a control point, a place in the flow where the data and the decisions live. Today I put real names on it. If you missed Thursday, start there.

The pattern showing up in the latest earnings is that the winners are turning AI from a threat into a product, repositioning as the security layer for AI itself. CrowdStrike ($CRWD) was named to Anthropic's defensive coalition and its CEO described the company as "AI security infrastructure." Palo Alto Networks ($PANW) has an AI-security product that went from nothing to a few hundred customers in under a year, among the fastest ramps it has seen. Cloudflare ($NET) calls AI the biggest tailwind in its history.

Two things keep this honest. The uplift spreads unevenly, so control-point owners capture the spend while narrow tools a big platform can absorb get squeezed. And these AI-security lines are still a small slice of total revenue for all of them, so AI is building on growth that was already there instead of replacing the core story. That's what makes it a durable tailwind worth tracking, not a one-quarter spike to chase.

The names I hold here sit across the winning layers, all disclosed positions: CrowdStrike on the endpoint and response layer, Palo Alto on the platform layer, and Cloudflare at the network edge. Below, I walk through all three, the one name I'd avoid on the AI question, the rest of the basket, and the honest risks.

The rest of this issue, the full basket and my reasoning on every name, is for paid subscribers.