CrowdStrike agrees to buy AI security startups Fiddler and Dreadnode

George Kurtz, chief executive and founder of CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike has agreed to buy two AI security companies, Fiddler AI and Dreadnode. It announced both on Tuesday at its Fal.Con Europe conference in Barcelona. Fiddler tracks what AI agents do and why. Dreadnode tests AI models, applications and agents for weaknesses before they go live.

CrowdStrike did not disclose the prices. It plans to pay mostly in cash, plus some stock with vesting conditions, according to the Fiddler and Dreadnode announcements. Both deals are expected to close in CrowdStrike’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2027, subject to customary closing conditions.

“When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying ‘the model did it’ is not an answer,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive and founder. “Fiddler is the flight recorder for every agent: the observability to explain exactly what an agent did and why.”

CrowdStrike will sell Fiddler as Falcon Observe, part of its Falcon platform. It is due in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027. CrowdStrike says it will let companies see what every agent did and why, and prove it stayed within its task. Fiddler’s purpose-built models can cut evaluation costs by up to 98%, according to the company.

“We started Fiddler to help enterprises answer a fundamental question: can I trust what my AI agents are doing?” said Krishna Gade, Fiddler’s chief executive and co-founder.

Dreadnode runs more than 100 known AI attack strategies, including jailbreaks and prompt injection. It targets models, agent reasoning loops, applications and MCP servers. It maps what it finds to frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for large language models, MITRE ATLAS and NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework. Its team will join CrowdStrike’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab. The testing product is due in the same quarter as Falcon Observe.

“AI fails in ways traditional testing was never designed to catch, and the people best equipped to find those failures think like attackers,” said Brad Palm, Dreadnode’s chief executive.

CrowdStrike also launched an AI Kill Switch in Falcon Guardian, its AI security product. If an agent goes rogue, a defender can stop it where it runs and block it from launching again. The switch also cuts the agent’s access to the company network. An authorised administrator triggers it, and every action is logged. The release says the sensor stops agents at the gateway first, and “soon” on the endpoint. Unlike the two acquisitions, the switch is available today.

“If one goes off course, the AI Kill Switch gives our security team the final say,” said Rick Orloff, chief information security officer at Everpure, a CrowdStrike customer.

On the same day, CrowdStrike said it is bringing Falcon Guardian inside Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. The Falcon sensor runs inside the virtual machine where Cowork’s agents execute code. The integration is in beta on macOS, with Windows support expected later in November, CrowdStrike wrote in a blog post.

On Monday, the first day of the conference, CrowdStrike announced security deals with Dell for its AI Factory with Nvidia, and with Dynatrace and CoreWeave. It also said 15 partners, including BT, Deutsche Telekom Security, Orange Cyberdefense and Telefónica, had joined Project QuiltWorks as it expands across Europe. The programme uses frontier AI models to help customers find and fix security risks.

In September, CrowdStrike put OpenAI in the product and launched multi-agent investigations. In October, it linked South Korean bank breaches to AI tools. The conference ends on Wednesday.

Cristian Dina is the CRO at The Next Web. He has interviewed 300+ industry leaders and authored the book King of Networking, establishing hi (show all) Cristian Dina is the CRO at The Next Web. He has interviewed 300+ industry leaders and authored the book King of Networking, establishing himself as one of the most connected and respected voices in the ecosystem. At just 23 years old, Cristian was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 2025 list, representing a new generation of tech builders, bold thinkers who move fast, build with purpose, and create real impact.

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Thanks! Check your inbox to confirm your subscription.

By subscribing you agree to our Privacy Statement.