Jim Cramer delivers unmistakable 2026 must-buy call on AI stock
I wrote about Broadcom CEO Hock Tan brushing off Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development, saying his revenue targets hadn’t budged.
This time, a different CEO made a different but equally important argument, which Jim Cramer responded to.
“The most important post you will read on this MUST BUY stock.
Cramer wrote on X (formerly Twitter) linking to CrowdStrike (CRWD) CEO George Kurtz’s response to Amodei’s essay. That’s not how you talk about a stock you’re not sure about.
Kurtz’s post on X was worth the attention, too. Why? Cybersecurity is at the center of this AI elephant debate. And the best person to get insights from is our 30-plus-year guru in the industry and the CEO of the top American cybersecurity company.
While the broader market was debating whether slowing AI development would reduce security risks, the CrowdStrike CEO made a sharp counterpoint: slowing what comes next doesn’t secure what’s already here.
“The genie’s out of the bottle,” Kurtz said on CNBC’s “Mad Money” on Sep. 14. “There’s plenty of models that are already out there, both frontier as well as open-weight models, that can already be dangerous.”
CRWD surged nearly 14% on Sep. 14. Currently, as of this reporting, CRWD is at its all-time high.
Also Read: CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Latest News and Stories
Why CrowdStrike’s CEO argument flips the AI slowdown narrative on its head
There’s a logic that moved markets on Sep. 14, and it’s good that we follow it carefully. Amodei’s essay argues that developing more powerful AI models without adequate safeguards creates existential risk.
Most of the investment community read that as a potential headwind for AI infrastructure spending — hence the day’s selloff in chip stocks. Broadcom fell 4.8%. The iShares Semiconductor ETF dropped 5.6%, as reported in my previous coverage.
But Kurtz’s response reframed the entire question. The debate about the pace of frontier model development, he argued, is largely irrelevant to near-term cybersecurity demand because the dangerous models already exist.
“It’s incumbent on the security industry to be able to help protect at least the models that are out there, while the frontier models determine what pace they’re actually going to evolve,” Kurtz said on “Mad Money.”
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His X post went further, describing what he’s seeing from the front lines in seven specific points. The one that strikes me as most important:
“The unit of threat is no longer the hacker. It’s an autonomous campaign. I call it the Agent-state. We see coordinated AI agents executing attack campaigns at machine speed.”
The claim that the threat has already fundamentally changed, regardless of what happens at the model frontier, is what makes CrowdStrike’s demand story durable even in an AI slowdown scenario. The attack surface doesn’t shrink if labs moderate their pace. It’s already wide open.
Kurtz also pointed to a specific incident that illustrates this. Earlier this summer, rogue OpenAI agents escaped a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, according to Kurtz’s comments on “Mad Money”.
That kind of runtime deviation (AI agents acting outside their intended parameters) creates demand for a security layer that monitors agents’ operation in production.
“We can look at what these programs do. We can put our own guardrails around them at runtime,” Kurtz said.
The numbers behind CrowdStrike’s rally
CrowdStrike’s most recent quarter, reported Aug. 26, gives Cramer’s “must buy” call a fundamental foundation.
CrowdStrike’s Q2 fiscal 2027 highlights:
- Revenue of $1.47 billion, up 26% year-over-year (YoY)
- Annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $5.84 billion, up 25% YoY
- Record net new ARR of $333 million, up 51% YoY — beating Street expectations by 17%
- Falcon Flex ARR exceeding $2.29 billion, up 101% YoY
- Record free cash flow of $377 million
The company also raised full-year fiscal 2027 net new ARR growth guidance by 630 basis points to 34% YoY at the midpoint. Non-GAAP subscription gross margin expanded to 81%.
I previously covered the Morgan Stanley note on this quarter in detail. I remember the firm described the results as a genuine inflection.
That’s evidence that an increasingly threatening environment was translating directly into customer traction at CrowdStrike. Sep. 14 Kurtz’s post made that thesis louder and more visible to a much broader audience.
CRWD has now returned 106.92% year-to-date and 118.08% over the past year, according to Yahoo Finance.
Palo Alto Networks (PANW), which I’ve covered alongside CrowdStrike throughout the Mythos cybersecurity narrative, has a 103.63% year-to-date return.
The regulatory risk CrowdStrike’s CEO flagged, and why it matters
Kurtz pushed back on one piece of the Amodei framework that I think deserves attention, too. While he supported greater safety in both lab development and production runtime, he warned against heavy government regulation of AI development itself.
“If we put too much regulation around this, then it’s going to stifle innovation,” Kurtz said, noting that the U.S. lead over China in AI is narrower than people assume.
His preferred path? AI developers and cybersecurity firms working together directly, with independent red teamers and real production controls rather than governance documents. He specifically cited Anthropic’s Project Glasswing — used to safeguard the Mythos model — as the kind of collaborative approach that actually works.
My read is that Kurtz is threading a needle that most CEOs avoid. See, he’s validating the security concern without validating the regulatory solution.
That’s a credible position from someone who runs a company whose entire business depends on the threat environment remaining complex, but who also has a genuine front-line view of how the threat environment is actually evolving.
Cramer calls it a must-buy. The stock just hit a record close. The quarter backs it up. The threat narrative just got a lot louder.
Related: CrowdStrike’s AI bet just paid off in a big way
