CrowdStrike announced agreements to acquire two AI security companies: Palo Alto-based Fiddler AI, which monitors AI agents and explains their decisions, and Dreadnode, which builds offensive tools for testing AI systems. The company did not disclose the amounts. According to The Wall Street Journal, which reported the deals ahead of the official announcement, it is paying about $400 million for Fiddler and about $95 million for Dreadnode, mostly in cash and partly in stock. The deals are expected to close in the fourth quarter of CrowdStrike's fiscal 2027, which ends on January 31, 2027.
Fiddler's technology will be sold as Falcon Observe: pre-deployment evaluation of agents, tracing of their reasoning and tool calls, detection of behavioral drift and hallucinations in production, audit logging, and tracking of token usage and spending. Dreadnode's platform takes a plain-language description of what to test and runs more than 100 known attack strategies against models, agents, applications and MCP servers, including jailbreaks and prompt injection. Findings will be ranked by severity and fed into the Falcon Guardian product.
Alongside the acquisitions, CrowdStrike added an "AI Kill Switch" to Falcon Guardian that lets an authorized administrator halt a misbehaving agent, stop it from restarting and cut off its network access. The Dreadnode-based testing capabilities are expected to become generally available in the same quarter. It is the latest in a series of CrowdStrike acquisitions over the past year, after SGNL and Seraphic in January.