CrowdStrike agrees to buy Fiddler AI and Dreadnode

CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire AI monitoring company Fiddler AI and AI security testing firm Dreadnode. The companies have not disclosed the terms; The Wall Street Journal reported a combined price of about US$495 million, comprising roughly US$400 million for Fiddler and US$95 million for Dreadnode. CrowdStrike said payment will be mostly in cash, with some stock subject to vesting conditions. The deals are expected to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2027, which ends on 31 January 2027.

Fiddler’s technology monitors AI agents and explains their decisions. CrowdStrike says it will add pre-deployment evaluation, tracing of agents’ reasoning and tool calls, and detection of behavioural drift and hallucinations in production. The system can also log activity for compliance audits and track token use and spending; CrowdStrike plans to offer it as Falcon Observe.

Dreadnode’s platform lets users specify tests in plain language, then runs more than 100 known attack strategies, including jailbreaks and prompt injection, against AI models, agents, applications and MCP servers. CrowdStrike says results are ranked by severity, mapped to frameworks including the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, MITRE ATLAS and the NIST AI RMF, and passed to Falcon Guardian AI for policy recommendations.

Dreadnode’s team will join CrowdStrike’s Cyber Superintelligence Lab, with its testing capabilities expected to become generally available in the same fiscal quarter. CrowdStrike also introduced an AI Kill Switch in Falcon Guardian, allowing authorised administrators to stop a misbehaving agent, prevent it restarting and cut off its network access.