Dreadnode Is Joining CrowdStrike
Brad Palm and Nick Landers · Nov 02, 2026
Today, during George Kurtz and Bartley Richardson’s Fal.Con Europe keynote, CrowdStrike announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dreadnode.
Once the deal closes, our team will join CrowdStrike’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab. We’ll bring what we’ve learned breaking AI systems and put it to work for CrowdStrike’s defenders. It’s the work this crew was built for, now with a lot more horsepower behind it. We couldn’t be prouder of the people who got us here.
Our automated AI security testing capabilities will be heading to the Falcon platform, so teams can break their own models and agents before an adversary does. You can read the details in the official press release.
Why now
We’re in the heyday of AI-powered attacks. This summer, frontier models made a big jump, and attackers picked up a lot of leverage overnight. Meanwhile, every enterprise we talk to is being pushed to put agents into production this year. Very few have a way to test them before they ship.
Policymakers and national security teams are all asking the same question: how do we prepare for what these models can do now? Our team has spent the past year answering it in public. We shipped Dreadnode 2.0, published DreadIndex, and helped bring the field together at the inaugural Offensive AI Con.
When the threat grows this fast, the defense has to grow faster. The only way to do that is to train it against real attacks.
Why CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike built a Cyber Superintelligence Lab that runs research across evals, optimization, synthetic data, and training, and SafeMind, which builds CrowdStrike’s own security models and harnesses. Offense drives defense. CrowdStrike’s lab trains its defenses against its own attack agents. We’ve spent three years building attack agents. The fit was obvious from the first conversation.
We saw early how AI would upend security, and we built a team and technology to match. CrowdStrike gives that work a reach we could never get on our own. Through Falcon, our automated AI security testing lands in front of far more defenders, and security becomes the thing that lets them move fast with agents instead of the thing that slows them down.
We’ve always run Dreadnode like a lab, because you can’t rent real capability. Now we get to build with one of the largest security companies in the world. This isn’t an exit for us. It’s a call-up to the big leagues, with more resources and a higher bar.
Thank you
None of this happens without the people who bet on us early. To our customers, who trusted us with their hardest problems and pushed us to get better. To our investors - Decibel, In-Q-Tel, Sands Capital, Next Frontier Capital, IndieVC, Aviso - who believed in our vision before it was obvious.
Most of all, to the Dreadnode crew both past and present. You’re the most lights out team we’ve had the pleasure of serving alongside, and you amaze us day in and day out. Experience in AI is time served. This space moves so fast that you can only learn it as it happens, and you’ve lived every bit of it. You started when most of security wasn’t taking AI seriously, and you kept going until the industry caught up. Every one of you could lead in any AI or security org. We can’t wait to keep building with you.
The mission doesn’t change. We’re still working toward a future where AI strengthens defenders faster than it strengthens their adversaries. Now we will get to do it at CrowdStrike scale.