Key Takeaways
- Goldman Sachs has barred most of its bankers and traders from AI coding tools like Claude Code, and Replit CEO Amjad Masad says bans like it are widespread in finance.
- CrowdStrike launched an AI Kill Switch for rogue agents and agreed to buy two AI security startups for a reported $495 million combined.
- Banks will still want AI agents, so they’ll need a way to control them, and CrowdStrike’s AI detection and response business nearly tripled its ARR from the April quarter to the July quarter.
- At 173x forward earnings against a three-year average of 104x, the stock needs the October-quarter report to show this demand in dollars.
Goldman Sachs (GS) has barred most of its bankers and traders from using AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and Microsoft’s GitHub, Bloomberg reported on Nov. 2.
Replit CEO Amjad Masad says Goldman has company: “This is widespread in finance. The ban hammer is coming down,” he posted on X on Nov. 2.
The next day, CrowdStrike (CRWD) launched an AI Kill Switch for rogue agents.
Talk about timing.
Banks Are Spooked
Masad calls AI agents running on employees’ computers “a systemic security risk for enterprises & governments.” A few days earlier, he flagged a compromised version of the official Claude Code extension that tried to plant backdoors on developer machines. The scope was narrower than that sounds: the tampered copy was pushed only through Cursor’s extension marketplace, for about 11 hours on Oct. 29, reaching at most 5,000 users, and Anthropic didn’t build it.
Goldman’s own move is narrower than the word “ban” suggests, too. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal said on TBPN that “Goldman is clamping down on its non-technical employees,” and Bloomberg reported the change followed a review of productivity and risk management.
Its roughly 12,000 engineers, plus the “strats” who mix trading and coding, kept access under guidance the bank updated in October. They’re the ones writing the bank’s code.
Banks Still Need the Agents
I don’t see bans like Goldman’s lasting. Companies want what these agents can do, and on CrowdStrike’s Aug. 26 call, CEO George Kurtz put the number of agents each person will have at an estimated 90. What a bank’s security team needs is a way to watch those agents and stop the ones that go off script.
That’s exactly CrowdStrike’s pitch. The kill switch sits inside Falcon Guardian, CrowdStrike’s AI detection and response product. It lets security administrators stop agents that act outside their instructions through gateway controls, keep them from relaunching and cut off their access to the company network, with every action logged. It’s available now.
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CrowdStrike also agreed to buy two AI security startups: Fiddler AI, which tracks what agents decide and do, and Dreadnode, which tests AI models and agents against more than 100 known attack strategies before they go live. CrowdStrike didn’t disclose the prices, but The Wall Street Journal reported $400 million for Fiddler and $95 million for Dreadnode. CrowdStrike expects the products built from both to be generally available in the quarter ending in January.
And the demand is already there. AI detection and response ARR nearly tripled from the April quarter to the July quarter, and total net new ARR rose 51% to a record $332.8 million in the quarter to July 31.
CrowdStrike Stock Is Ahead of the Estimates
Analysts already expect revenue to grow 25% to $6.01 billion in the fiscal year ending January 2027, and to more than double from fiscal 2026’s $4.81 billion to $10.7 billion by fiscal 2030, though only four analysts forecast that far:
The Fiddler and Dreadnode products don’t ship until the quarter ending in January, so I wouldn’t expect this week’s news to move those estimates much yet.
The stock has already moved, though. CrowdStrike has more than doubled this year. At the Nov. 2 close, it traded at 171x forward earnings, far above its three-year average of 104x, and Nov. 3’s 1.2% gain lifted that to 173x:
The kill switch also has a gap. For now it stops agents at the gateway, and shutting one down directly on the employee’s machine is planned for a later release. CrowdStrike won’t have this budget to itself either: SentinelOne put its own agent detection and response product into early access on Oct. 21.
The Number CrowdStrike Still Hasn’t Given
Goldman can ban agents for a while, but sooner or later it will want a way to control them, and CrowdStrike now sells one. I think that becomes a real budget line, with CrowdStrike first in line for it. But at this price the stock already assumes CrowdStrike wins that budget, so I’d wait for the agent business to show up in the numbers before buying.
The first chance comes with CrowdStrike’s October-quarter report, expected on Dec. 1, where the guide calls for $343 million to $347 million of net new ARR. So far, management has only described AI detection and response by its growth rate, so a dollar figure would show how big the business really is.
So what is CrowdStrike stock actually worth?
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