Post-Mythos Security Rally Rewards Broad Cyber Platforms

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning , Governance & Risk Management , -Generation Technologies & Secure Development

Security's Mythos moment has lasted nearly half a year, with six prominent cyber vendors doubling their valuations since Anthropic debuted its cutting-edge frontier artificial intelligence model.

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CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks got in on the ground floor as early participants in Anthropic's Project Glasswing collective defense program, and their stock prices enjoyed the windfall, recording the second and fourth-largest gains of the 15 pure play and hybrid cybersecurity vendors examined by ISMG since Claude Mythos was announced on April 7, 2026.

But the largest post-Mythos stock price gain actually belongs to the world's largest pure play identity platform: Okta. Even though the San Francisco-based identity titan didn't join Anthropic's Project Glasswing until May 27, Okta's stock price has increased by 130.7% since Mythos debuted, reaching a valuation of $32 billion.

As autonomous agents proliferate and pure play identity investment opportunities decrease following Palo Alto Networks' acquisition of CyberArk, Okta becomes an increasingly attractive target. Okta's technology helps count AI agents, and every agent a company deploys needs an identity before it can touch anything. Investors therefore treat Okta's growth as a proxy for future AI security spend.

The sole hybrid security player to make the top five in post-Mythos stock price gain is Snowflake, which provides the data layer on which enterprises increasingly want AI to operate (see: How Recent Cyber Earnings Show Growth Alone No Longer Pays ).

Advancements in frontier and open-weight models may increase the value of platforms that own, integrate or provide access to the context AI needs to act. Organizations increasingly need tools that allow them to own, integrate and control contextual data, combined with domain depth to make it actionable.

Rounding out the top five in post-Mythos gains is Fortinet, which has seen its stock price increase by 102% since April 7, reaching a valuation of $124.1 billion. Fortinet runs firewall, SD-WAN and SASE on one operating system, and last quarter integrated six security operations functions into a single console. Fortinet's technology is powered by a proprietary ASIC chip, making it less susceptible to third parties.

It's a very different story for network security rival Check Point Software, the only cyber vendor that experienced a stock price drop since the Mythos announcement. The company has struggled to turn its organic and inorganic investments into topline growth, with total revenue increasing by just 1% and security subscriptions growing by 12%.

Check Point has significant breadth due to investments in recent years, but - unlike Palo Alto Networks - has failed to achieve a market-leading position in spaces outside the network firewall from either a market or technology analyst perspective. Buyers want vendors who own either the silicon, the network or the platform, and Check Point can't convincingly say it owns any of those today.

In the cloud security space, Cloudflare spooked investors in May by laying off one-fifth of its workforce, but the company has increased its stock price by nearly 50% since Mythos was announced, reaching a valuation of nearly $115 million. Cloudflare sits on the network itself, and sells security, performance, connectivity, developer infrastructure and AI at the edge. Zero trust is part of a larger platform.

After a sluggish start to 2026, Zscaler's stock has rebounded since Mythos was announced, climbing 40% to a valuation of $32.5 billion. Investors favor high-growth targets like Cloudflare - which increased sales by 36% - over more modestly-growing vendors like Zscaler, which is enjoying organic growth of 20%.

While Zscaler has expanded into data security, workloads, branches, browsers, AI security and SecOps, most of that reinforces how enterprises connect to applications, data and the internet. While companies like Palo Alto Networks and Cloudflare offer different platforms that appeal to different buying personas, Zscaler's expansion remains focused on zero trust, limiting the directions in which it can grow.

Unfounded fears in the first quarter of 2026 over frontier labs displacing standalone security vendors with cyber products of their own has given way to unbridled optimism that security vendors are the only thing standing between AI advancements and complete and utter chaos.

But not all security vendors are created equal. The vast majority of new cyber investment went to the three vendors with the broadest and deepest security footprint: Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and Fortinet. Everyone else has been left fighting for scraps.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Governance & Risk Management

-Generation Technologies & Secure Development

Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing (VA/PT)

Executive Editor, Business, ISMG

Novinson is responsible for covering the vendor and technology landscape. Prior to joining ISMG, he spent four and a half years covering all the major cybersecurity vendors at CRN, with a focus on their programs and offerings for IT service providers. He was recognized for his breaking news coverage of the August 2019 coordinated ransomware attack against local governments in Texas as well as for his continued reporting around the SolarWinds hack in late 2020 and early 2021.