CrowdStrike to Acquire Dreadnode to Advance AI Trust and Deliver Automated AI Security Testing for the Agentic Enterprise

CrowdStrike announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dreadnode, a player in Automated AI Security Testing. Dreadnode will extend the Falcon platform to continuously test every AI model, application, and agent for security weaknesses before deployment.“Enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can prove it is secure. A model can be jailbroken, an agent can be manipulated, and most organizations have no way to find those flaws until the AI is already in production,” said George Kurtz, CEO and founder, CrowdStrike. “With Dreadnode, CrowdStrike will give every enterprise the power to trust AI and deploy faster, with confidence.”

Building AI Trust: Securing the AI Enterprises Build and Deploy
AI has broken the security testing model, which has traditionally been applied vs. code that behaves the same way every time. AI models and agents are probabilistic, can be jailbroken or manipulated through prompt injection, and fail in ways conventional testing was not designed to catch. Those weaknesses live inside the model and the agent’s reasoning loop, the layer conventional testing never reaches. Identifying and fixing AI weaknesses needs to happen at the speed AI is being deployed. 

With this acquisition, Dreadnode will extend the Falcon platform into the layer where enterprises build and test AI, delivering Automated AI Security Testing capabilities that extend CrowdStrike’s leadership in the AI Detection and Response (AIDR) category. Automated AI Security Testing will be available in Q4 FY27.

Dreadnode: Automated AI Security Testing on the Falcon Platform
With Dreadnode, CrowdStrike will deliver Automated AI Security Testing on the Falcon platform:

• Automated AI Security Testing: Describe what to test in plain language. Dreadnode runs more than 100 known AI attack strategies, including jailbreaks, prompt injection, and multi-turn and agent-specific attacks, vs. the models, agent reasoning loops, applications, and MCP servers that power enterprise AI
• Findings, Remediation, and Framework Mapping: Dreadnode ranks findings by severity, maps them to OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, OWASP Agentic Security (ASI01-ASI10), MITRE ATLAS, and NIST AI RMF, and delivers exportable reports so teams can make go/no-go decisions before deployment
• Model and Component Scanning: Dreadnode scans AI models, model repositories, and components for vulnerabilities before they reach production
• Human-in-the-Loop Review: Operators reclassify findings, adjust severity, and document their reasoning, with dashboard metrics recomputing automatically
• Falcon Guardian and SafeMind Integration: Dreadnode findings will feed Falcon Guardian as policy recommendations, so a weakness found in testing strengthens runtime protection, and Dreadnode testing data will strengthen CrowdStrike’s SafeMind models

Expanding CrowdStrike’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab
The Dreadnode team will join CrowdStrike’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab, deepening the company’s bench of AI security researchers. Dreadnode’s technology will also sharpen how SafeMind measures the security and cyber capabilities of frontier models, advancing CrowdStrike’s research into securing AI systems.

“AI fails in ways traditional testing was never designed to catch, and the people best equipped to find those failures think like attackers. We founded Dreadnode to expose those weaknesses before AI reaches production,” said Brad Palm, CEO, Dreadnode. “As part of CrowdStrike, we will bring Automated AI Security Testing to every enterprise, helping teams confidently find and fix weaknesses.”

Transaction Details
The purchase price is contemplated to be paid predominantly in cash and includes a portion to be delivered in the form of stock subject to vesting conditions. The proposed acquisition is expected to close during CrowdStrike’s fourth quarter of FY27, subject to customary closing conditions.