Artificial intelligence was supposed to make security software easier to replace. Instead, it is giving cybersecurity companies more work.
Cybersecurity stocks have quietly outrun the rest of software over the past month.
The Amplify Cybersecurity ETF
The reason is a reversal in the AI narrative.
The rise of autonomous agents creates new attack surfaces, new identities to manage and new governance requirements. Each one adds to the security budget instead of shrinking it.
Bank of America acted on that view Friday, raising price targets on CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.
Why AI Agents Could Expand Cybersecurity Spending
"Every AI agent ultimately requires authentication, authorization, monitoring, and heightened governance," Bank of America analyst Tal Liani said in a Friday note.
That mechanism favors identity-security providers Okta and SailPoint.
Their software decides which users and machines can access corporate systems and what they can do inside them.
The bank raised its price target on Okta to $200, based on 11 times estimated calendar 2027 enterprise value to sales, up from nine times.
SailPoint went to $22, on eight times the same measure, up from seven times.
The opportunity extends beyond identity.
Companies also need tools spanning endpoints, networks and cloud workloads to detect agents behaving outside their instructions.
That supports platform vendors such as CrowdStrike, which saw its target lifted to $260, on 36 times estimated calendar 2027 sales, up from 32 times.
Liani tied the premium to product announcements at the company's Fal.Con conference in early September, including Guardian, a tool for detecting and responding to AI activity, and SafeMind, a system meant to let security teams run frontier AI models safely.
"We believe the market is increasingly pricing in a step-function increase in cyber risk," Liani said.
The analyst also highlighted two recent signals.
Anthropic's chief executive Dario Amodei warned that within six to 12 months a swarm of agents could do billions of dollars of damage online.
OpenAI disclosed cases of agents inserting instructions, hiding mistakes and trying to work around restrictions.
The Ratings Did Not Move
None of the three upgrades was a ratings change.
CrowdStrike, Okta and SailPoint all remain Neutral at Bank of America, which leaves the higher targets roughly 6% to 9% above where the shares closed Sept. 17.
The stocks were lower Friday, with CrowdStrike down 1.4% at $242.15, Okta off 1.8% at $186.58 and SailPoint down 1.2% at $19.94. Both cyber ETFs slipped about 1%.
