PANW News & Events

TD Cowen notes Flex (FLEX), contract manufacturer of hardware firewalls for Fortinet (FTNT), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), and Check Point (CHKP) partner, reported robust Q4 results and strong guidance fueled by AI-driven data center build outs. The firm believes the market-related commentary is highly indicative of a positive current business momentum in network security and expects beat-and-raise results from Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks as TD Cowen considers Check Point's revenue miss an isolated event. Overall, the firm considers Flex's robust Q4 financials and strong forward guidance indicative of continued strong momentum in network security and expect beat-and-raise results from Buy-rated Fortinet and Buy-rated Palo Alto.

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.USE OF AI:In an internal Q&A with staff, MetaCEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Facebook parent intends to shrink teams and make more new apps as AI changes workflows at the company, The Wall Street Journal's Meghan Bobrowsky, citing a recording of the Q&A. The CEO attributed the 8% drop in shares to investor worries over an upward revision in its expected capex spending and to its outlook for slower growth in Q2, the author says. "I think the trajectory that we're seeing for our businesses is still very strong," he said on the call. "But I think Q1 was, like, really insanely strong and Q2 is merely strong, and I think the combination of that and the capex increase is what drove the near-term reaction. But I don't know." Zuckerberg added that there was a "trajectory change" in the company's ad business following the start of the U.S.-Iran war, the author notes. "If oil prices go up then consumers spend more of their money on oil, on gas, and less on things that they would just buy that are just kind of discretionary things that the advertising might serve," he said.ASSURED ROBOT INTELLIGENCE:Meta is acquiring Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup working on AI models for robots, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. A spokesperson told Bloomberg that the Facebook parent closed the acquisition Friday, with terms not disclosed. The startup's team will join the Meta Superintelligence Labs research unit, the author notes.ADVANCED ACCOUNT SECURITY:OpenAI is introducing Advanced Account Security, a new opt-in setting for ChatGPT accounts, designed for people at increased risk of digital attacks, as well as for those who want the strongest account protections available. The company believes it brings together a set of heightened security measures that help safeguard against account takeover while making those protections easier to activate in one place. Once enrolled, Advanced Account Security protects users in Codex as well. an increased responsibility for account recovery. Advanced Account Security requires passkeys or physical security keys while disabling password-based login, helping make phishing-resistant sign-in the default for people who need it most. If a user's email account or phone number is compromised, an attacker may try to use one of them to gain access to their ChatGPT account via e-mail or SMS based recovery. To reduce this risk, Advanced Account Security disables email and SMS recovery and requires stronger recovery methods: backup passkeys, security keys, and recovery keys. Sign-in sessions are shortened to reduce the window of exposure if a device or active session is compromised. People working with especially sensitive information may opt not to have those conversations used for model training. "Using physical security keys, such as YubiKeys, is one of the strongest defenses against phishing. To make that level of protection easier to access, we have partnered with Yubico, a leader in hardware-based authentication and account protection, to offer our users preferred pricing on a customized bundle of best in class security keys. The YubiKey C Nano is designed to stay in your laptop for simple, low-friction daily authentication, and the YubiKey C NFC for backup, and use across laptops and mobile devices," OpenAI added.CLAUDE SECURITY:Anthropic said in aon X, formerly Twitter, that Claude Security is now in public beta for Claude Enterprise customers. "Claude scans your codebase for vulnerabilities, validates each finding to cut false positives, and suggests patches you can review and approve," the company said. "Many security teams have asked how to put Opus 4.7 to work on their code without standing up custom tooling. Claude Security is that on-ramp: no API integration or agent build required. Since the research preview in February, hundreds of organizations have used it on production code, catching issues existing scanners had missed. Based on early feedback, we've added scheduled scans, directory-level targeting, CSV and Markdown exports, webhook notifications for new findings, and dismissals that carry forward across scans." Publicly traded companies in the cybersecurity space include Check Point (CHKP), CrowdStrike, CyberArk, F5, Fortinet, Gen Digital, Okta, Palo Alto Networksand Qualys.

Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire Portkey, a pioneer in AI Gateways. Portkey delivers a critical centralized control plane to manage and protect autonomous AI agents, already processing trillions of tokens per month with the low latency required for agent-to-agent communication. By ensuring that security governance never comes at the expense of developer speed, Portkey allows enterprises to accelerate AI innovation with confidence. Following the close, Palo Alto Networks will continue to support existing and new Portkey customers, who will also be able to benefit from the tighter integration with Prisma AIRS as part of a comprehensive AI Security platform. Subject to customary closing conditions, the transaction is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks fourth quarter in fiscal 2026.