Published in 2026. This article examines developments from 2024 to 2026.
Introduction
AI cybersecurity is not one market but several adjacent categories — endpoint and identity protection, cloud security posture management, email and behavioral security, and Threat Intelligence — that increasingly overlap as vendors expand their platforms. Between 2024 and 2026, the clearest signals about where the category is heading came less from marketing claims about detection accuracy and more from concrete events: a landmark acquisition, a major operational incident, and a wave of platform consolidation. This guide walks through the main categories using verified company examples and the market signals that matter most for evaluating them, and deliberately avoids repeating unverifiable market-size or detection-rate figures that circulate widely in vendor marketing but cannot be independently confirmed.
Endpoint and identity protection: the AI-native benchmark
CrowdStrike, co-founded by George Kurtz in 2011 (with its Falcon platform launching in 2013), remains the most widely referenced benchmark for AI-assisted endpoint defense at enterprise scale, having expanded from endpoint detection into identity protection, cloud security, and a next-generation SIEM product. The company’s standing took a well-documented hit on July 19, 2024, when a faulty content update to the Falcon sensor caused a global IT outage affecting airlines, hospitals, and other sectors; Kurtz publicly apologized and CrowdStrike published a detailed post-incident review alongside changes to its testing and deployment processes. SentinelOne, founded by Tomer Weingarten and Almog Cohen in 2013, competes directly in this category with its Singularity platform and has continued to invest in AI-driven detection, including a definitive agreement announced in August 2025 to acquire Prompt Security. Both companies illustrate that endpoint protection has become as much a test of operational reliability and incident response as of raw detection capability.
Cloud security: Wiz and the largest deal in Israeli tech history
No single event shaped the AI cybersecurity conversation from 2024 to 2026 more than Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz. Wiz, founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik — the same four who had earlier built and sold Adallom to Microsoft — built an agentless cloud security platform that analyzes AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Kubernetes environments for combinations of risk that could let an attacker compromise cloud resources. Alphabet announced its intent to acquire Wiz for roughly $32 billion in March 2025, and the deal closed in March 2026, making it the largest acquisition of an Israeli technology company on record and one of the largest cybersecurity acquisitions in the industry’s history. Rappaport has stated publicly that Wiz will continue supporting all major cloud providers rather than narrowing to Google Cloud exclusively. Orca Security, founded by Avi Shua and Gil Geron, remains a prominent agentless alternative in the same cloud-native application protection platform category, illustrating that the underlying approach Wiz popularized has become a category standard rather than a single company’s proprietary advantage.
Email and behavioral security: rebranding around AI-native identity
Abnormal Security, founded by Evan Reiser and Sanjay Jeyakumar in 2018, uses behavioral AI to detect business email compromise, phishing, and account takeover by modeling normal communication patterns rather than relying on known malicious signatures. The company rebranded to Abnormal AI in April 2025 as it broadened beyond email into wider identity and behavioral threat detection, a repositioning that reflects a broader trend of vendors reframing themselves around the “AI-native” label as buyers reassess legacy secure email gateway architecture. Reiser’s own background — moving from advertising-scale behavioral modeling at Twitter into cybersecurity — is a useful illustration of how techniques originally built for ad-tech personalization have migrated into security defense, and his co-founder Sanjay Jeyakumar, who focused on scalable infrastructure design, made a similar move alongside him.
Threat intelligence gets absorbed into payments and identity
Threat intelligence, historically a standalone category, showed clear signs of being absorbed into adjacent industries during this period. Mastercard completed its acquisition of Recorded Future, the AI-driven threat-intelligence company founded by Christopher Ahlberg in 2009, on December 20, 2024, with Mastercard explicitly stating it would integrate Recorded Future’s intelligence into its own cybersecurity, identity, and real-time fraud-scoring products. Mastercard executive Johan Gerber framed the acquisition around the idea that securing every interaction and transaction requires threat intelligence embedded directly into a payments network’s own risk products, rather than purchased as a bolt-on feed from a separate vendor relationship. That deal, paired with the earlier reported Mastercard interest in fraud-adjacent data assets, suggests payments companies increasingly see standalone threat intelligence as a capability worth owning outright rather than licensing, blurring the line between “cybersecurity company” and “fraud and risk vendor” that had previously kept these categories more separate.
Market signals worth weighing more than vendor claims
Across all four categories, the most reliable signals from 2024 to 2026 were not detection-rate marketing claims but structural events: acquisitions (Wiz–Google, Recorded Future–Mastercard), operational incidents (the CrowdStrike outage), and rebrands (Abnormal Security to Abnormal AI), each of which is independently verifiable through public disclosures. For buyers and analysts, these events say more about where capital and confidence are flowing than any vendor-reported benchmark, because acquisitions require large buyers to commit real capital based on their own diligence, and incidents force public accountability that marketing materials do not.
Founder continuity as a category signal
Founder continuity is another underappreciated signal in this category. George Kurtz has led CrowdStrike continuously since co-founding it in 2011, including through the reputational stress of the July 2024 outage, and remained the public face of the company’s recovery rather than being replaced. Assaf Rappaport led Wiz from its 2020 founding all the way through its sale to Alphabet, continuing in the CEO role after the deal closed rather than exiting at acquisition, which he had also not done after Adallom’s sale to Microsoft, where he stayed on to run Microsoft’s Israel R&D center. Evan Reiser has likewise remained CEO of Abnormal Security/Abnormal AI since its 2018 founding through its 2025 rebrand. This pattern of founders staying deeply involved through both crises and acquisitions is worth noting because cybersecurity is a category where customer trust is unusually sensitive to leadership credibility, and continuity at the top has tended to correlate with smoother customer communication during disruptive events.
How platform scope is expanding across categories
Nearly every company discussed in this guide expanded its platform scope during the 2024–2026 window rather than staying within its original category definition. CrowdStrike moved from pure endpoint protection into identity and SIEM data. Wiz and Orca Security both moved from posture management into broader workload and API security. SentinelOne’s planned acquisition of Prompt Security signals a move toward AI-specific security concerns — protecting an organization’s own AI systems and usage, not just its traditional infrastructure — as a new expansion vector. Abnormal broadened from email specifically into wider identity and behavioral detection as part of its 2025 rebrand. Recorded Future’s intelligence, once a standalone product, is being folded directly into Mastercard’s fraud and identity products rather than sold as an independent feed going forward. The throughline is that “staying in your lane” has become a less viable strategy in AI cybersecurity than continuously broadening the attack surface a platform claims to cover.
Conclusion
AI cybersecurity in this period consolidated around a smaller number of platforms doing more — CrowdStrike expanding from endpoint into identity and SIEM, Wiz becoming part of Google Cloud’s security portfolio, and threat intelligence flowing into payments companies’ risk products — even as newer entrants like Abnormal AI continued to carve out behavioral-detection niches and founders across the category stayed unusually involved through both crises and acquisitions. Readers evaluating vendors in this space should track CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Wiz, Abnormal Security, Orca Security, and Recorded Future as much for their ownership structure, founder continuity, and integration roadmap as for their published detection capabilities.