Affected by Anthropic's introduction of the Claude code security feature, US cybersecurity stocks plunged across the board

BlockBeats News, February 24th, since Anthropic launched Claude Code Security last Friday, several top-listed cybersecurity companies have seen a decline in their stock prices. Claude Code Security is an AI-driven code vulnerability scanning tool, released in a limited research preview version on February 20th.

According to the Anthropic website, its chatbot Claude is able to "scan the entire codebase for vulnerabilities, verify each finding to minimize false positives, and provide repair suggestions for review and approval." Claude's process of reasoning about code is "like that of a skilled security researcher," able to understand context, trace data flow, and "capture vulnerabilities missed by pattern-matching tools," and then propose fixes.

This week, the stock prices of the top five largest U.S. information technology security companies by market capitalization have continued to plummet. Palo Alto Networks, the largest U.S. cybersecurity company with a market capitalization of $116 billion, has seen its stock price drop by nearly 9% since the feature was launched. CrowdStrike, which provides endpoint security, threat intelligence, and network attack response services, has suffered even greater losses, with its stock price plummeting by 18% since February 20th, causing a $20 billion market value wipeout. Meanwhile, according to Google Finance data, Fortinet, headquartered in California, saw its stock price drop by 9% during the same period. Other leading cybersecurity companies, such as Cloudflare and Zscaler, have also seen their stock prices slide due to this new AI competitor.