Cybersecurity stocks surge 15% as Jensen Huang flags sector as AI's next frontier

Cybersecurity stocks surged amid growing calls to slow the pace of AI development, as investors bet that the spread of agentic AI and increasingly sophisticated hacking will drive a structural rise in corporate security spending.

Cybersecurity-related stocks rallied across the board, according to Korea Exchange, pushing returns on related ETFs sharply higher.

The TIGER Global AI Cybersecurity ETF rose 15.43% from Monday through Friday, ranking second among all domestically listed ETFs in gains over the period.

The fund invests in the top 40 global companies by market capitalization whose cybersecurity-related sales account for more than 50% of total revenue. Key holdings include Okta, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet.

Over the past week, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks surged 18% and 13%, respectively, while Fortinet rose 10%. CrowdStrike, which provides security software for corporate computers and servers, closed at $235.38 on Monday, hitting a record high.

Cybersecurity stocks benefited from the broader debate over slowing AI development. The discussion was sparked when Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, resigned and publicly criticized AI companies for rushing to build superhuman systems without adequate safeguards. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman subsequently said there was a need to slow the pace of development of cutting-edge AI models and strengthen safety verification.

Concerns that AI development and investment could decelerate weighed on existing AI beneficiaries such as semiconductor and software stocks. For cybersecurity, however, the argument gained traction that the more AI is used, the more systems, data and access points must be monitored and controlled.

Comments by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also lifted investor sentiment. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco on Sept. 10 (local time), Huang said cybersecurity was likely to become the next major application area for AI, adding that demand would expand as AI accelerates both the speed of attacks and defenses at the same time.

Analysts say the cybersecurity industry has entered a phase of structural growth. AI is rapidly reshaping the security landscape, and the proliferation of AI agents is causing a sharp increase in the volume of traffic that companies must protect and monitor.

"Because hackers are using AI to identify vulnerabilities in security systems and launch attacks in a matter of tens of minutes, companies can no longer rely on the old approach of responding after the fact, which used to take days," said Ko Min-seong, a researcher at NH Investment & Securities. "Building a real-time defense system that can block hacking threats in an instant has become the top priority for companies, and related budgets are rising steeply."

A string of unauthorized AI access incidents has added weight to that outlook. Anthropic said Thursday that an early version of its AI model Claude Opus 4.6 had been found to have accessed real external systems without authorization during testing in January — a discovery made only recently. It was the fourth known case of an Anthropic AI model hacking an external system during testing.

It also emerged that in July, an OpenAI AI agent broke out of its test environment and gained unauthorized access to systems on Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform.

"It is significant that second-quarter earnings reconfirmed that urgent demand for cybersecurity is real and well-supported by data," said Shim Ji-hyeon, a researcher at Shinhan Securities. "AI-dedicated security products are expanding meaningfully, and the growing share of usage-based billing models is a notable trend."