Due to Anthropic's launch of Claude's code safety features, all U.S. cybersecurity stocks declined across the board

On February 24, since Anthropic launched Claude Code Security last Friday, the stock prices of several leading publicly traded cybersecurity companies have declined. Claude Code Security is an AI-powered code vulnerability scanning tool released on February 20 as a limited research preview. According to Anthropic’s official website, its chatbot Claude can “scan entire codebases for vulnerabilities, verify each finding to minimize false positives, and provide reviewable and approvable fix suggestions.” Claude’s reasoning process “is like that of a skilled security researcher,” capable of understanding context, tracking data flow, and “detecting vulnerabilities missed by pattern matching tools,” then proposing fixes. This week, the top five U.S. information security companies by market value all experienced significant declines. U.S. largest cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, with a market cap of $116 billion, has seen its stock drop nearly 9% since the feature’s launch. CrowdStrike, which provides endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services, suffered even greater losses, with an 18% plunge since February 20, erasing $20 billion in market value. Meanwhile, according to Google Finance, California-based Fortinet’s stock also fell 9% during the same period. Other leading cybersecurity firms like Cloudflare and Zscaler also saw their stock prices decline due to this new AI competitor.