Palo Alto Networks
PANWstocks
$350.20
-1.94% past 24h
Key stats
Market cap
$4.9T
P/E ratio
43.0
EPS
$8.14
Dividend yield
1.24%
52w high
$414.77
52w low
$283.68
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is one of the largest cybersecurity companies, protecting enterprise networks, cloud workloads and security operations through its firewall and platform businesses.
Why cybersecurity stocks moved in 2026
April–June 2026
+112%
Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike roughly doubled in 2026, and the move traces back to one thing: concern about AI-powered hacking. The rally did not start in January — both stocks fell in the first quarter — but took off in April and carried on through the autumn.
Companies rushed to buy protection. Palo Alto Networks' CEO said more than 1,200 customers asked to meet in the weeks after Mythos, with 800 of those meetings held within six weeks.
- 1The Mythos moment (April)On 7 April, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing, giving security companies — Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike among them — early access to its unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model. Within a month, the programme had found more than 10,000 high- and critical-severity software vulnerabilities, showing that AI can now find weaknesses at scale. Both stocks roughly doubled between April and June.
- 2Results showed the demand was real (August)On 26 August, CrowdStrike reported ending annual recurring revenue of about $5.84 billion, up 25% on the year, and raised its full-year outlook. Its shares rose 20.5% the next day, their biggest gain of the year.
- 3Money rotated from chips to security (September)After Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman publicly warned about the pace and risks of AI development, investors sold chipmakers and bought cybersecurity. On Monday 14 September, Palo Alto Networks rose 13% and CrowdStrike 14%. The idea taking hold: companies cannot deploy AI without first paying for security.
Palo Alto Networks in 2026
- Closed its roughly $25 billion acquisition of identity-security company CyberArk on 11 February 2026.
- Named among the partners of Anthropic's Critical Infrastructure Defense Program, launched on 8 October 2026, contributing its Unit 42 threat intelligence.
Before 2026
Through 2025, investors worried that AI would replace security software or squeeze its prices. In 2026 the view flipped: AI makes attacks cheaper and more frequent, so every company needs more defence, not less.
What to watch
The main risk now is valuation. In September, Bernstein cut Palo Alto Networks to Market Perform, arguing the shares were fairly valued after their re-rating and that cybersecurity stocks already price in years of future growth.