CrowdStrike launches SafeMind, casts security as the AI control plane

Kurtz, in an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, at the Fal.Con event, said the industry drew the wrong lesson from the year's most-discussed agentic incident, in which an agent cheated on a test. "The industry got lucky that they were just cheating on a test," he said. "The defenders didn't have the same AI as the offense. And this was the missing element. It really highlighted the fact that advanced AI, frontier-capable AI, wasn't in the hands of the defenders, and that's the key."

The case for security as an AI control plane rests on where AI is consumed rather than where it is built, according to Kurtz. Inference runs on endpoints and in cloud containers, which he said CrowdStrike already covers, and the company's Signal AI acquisition extends that visibility into the identity layer. He described the control plane as a way to answer basic questions about agents operation: where are they, what are they doing, are they touching data they should not be touching, and are they connecting to systems they should not be connecting to.

SafeMind integrates purpose-built models with an economic argument. Kurtz said SafeMind runs an offensive model that finds the attack path alongside a defensive model that closes it, with harnesses operating both in the same loop. He said CrowdStrike measured the system against general-purpose alternatives. "We were 52% better than the best frontier model in terms of identifying vulnerabilities and issues in our test," he said. "The second piece is we were 98% cheaper. The frontier labs have great technology. We all use it, but they're not security people."

The company is also pushing toward a security operations center that does not require a human to review every step. Kurtz laid out five levels of autonomy for the SOC last year and is now targeting the highest level. "Part of why we started the Cyber Superintelligence Lab is to be able to build these sorts of technologies so that we can get to a level of automation where the car drives itself," he said. "Maybe the human has to be in the loop, and if something's really critical, fine. If you can automate the most mundane task and you can do it with the speed at which the adversary is moving, that's going to be critical."