SentinelOne shares sank 8% as the cybersecurity company laid off 8% of its full-time workforce to focus on artificial intelligence and data investments.

“This is not a reactive measure, it is a deliberate evolution to reduce complexity, raise the performance bar, and build a leaner, more agile SentinelOne,” CEO Tomer Weingarten told analysts on the earnings call Thursday.

Over the last few months, he said SentinelOne has restructured its teams and already seen “meaningful productivity” gains from ramped AI use.

In a securities filing, the company said it expects a one-time $25 million charge tied to the layoffs. The company had over 3,000 employees at the end of April.

Tech companies are increasingly slashing headcount as AI forces businesses to reallocate resources to keep pace with innovation. New AI tools are also allowing businesses to automate workloads.

Earlier this week, Israel-based web developer Wix slashed a fifth of its workforce due to AI and the strength of the Israeli shekel. Cisco downsized its headcount by nearly 5% earlier this month and Block roughly halved its workforce in February. Software firm Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs in March.

SentinelOne’s workforce cuts also came alongside lackluster guidance for the current quarter and full year.

The company said it anticipates between $289 million and $291 million in revenue, versus the $292 million expected by LSEG analysts. SentinelOne reiterated its full-year outlook, expecting revenue between $1.195 billion and $1.205 billion. That came up short of a $1.21 billion forecast.

“Combined with growing criticalness of category, this should have been a Q where it sustained recent gains; lack of material guidance raise leaves in holding pattern,” wrote analysts at Morgan Stanley.

Cybersecurity companies are in the middle of a significant inflection, spurred by Anthropic’s Mythos model and the rise of autonomous AI agents that are capable of exploiting vulnerabilities faster than ever before. That’s forcing businesses to scale their security defenses and invest in newer tools.

At the same time, some cybersecurity stocks have sold off this year, getting swept up in broader market fears that new AI tools will displace software businesses.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned Tuesday that artificial intelligence has created a narrow window for the world’s tech firms, governments and banks to fix tens of thousands of software vulnerabilities found by his company’s latest model.

That AI model, Mythos, was previewed last month along with the disclosure that it had unearthed decades-old vulnerabilities in crucial software.

Since AI models from geopolitical adversary China are “maybe six to 12 months” behind the Anthropic product, there is “roughly that amount of time” to fix these issues, Amodei said.

The comments came during an Anthropic event in which Amodei shared the stage with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and unveiled a new suite of agents meant to automate financial work.

“The danger is just some enormous increase in the amount of vulnerabilities, in the amount of breaches, in the financial damage that’s done from ransomware on schools, hospitals, not to mention banks,” Amodei said.

Anthropic has limited Mythos to a few partner companies because of concerns about what criminals or adversarial nations could do with it. The last several of the company’s model updates have reverberated through the markets, but Mythos has caused the most concern from corporations and policymakers alike.

The scale of potential cyber exploits has ballooned with each generation of Claude, Amodei said. An earlier Anthropic model found roughly 20 vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser. Mythos found nearly 300, and the total count across all software now runs into the tens of thousands, he said.

Most of the vulnerabilities found by Mythos haven’t been publicly disclosed because they remain unpatched, and “the bad guys will exploit” them if they are identified, Amodei said.

A survey released Friday by corporate insurer Axis Capital shows there’s a growing divide across the C-suite on how executives view the risks, rewards and impact of cutting-edge AI technology.  

On one hand, artificial intelligence is rapidly improving cybersecurity defense technologies, but AI is also equipping cybercriminals with sophisticated tools and creating new risks.

“When you think about AI, it is not merely a cyber challenge. This technology presents unique burdens, liabilities, challenges and opportunities to CEOs and boards alike,” Axis CEO Vincent Tizzio told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

Axis surveyed 250 CEOs and chief information security officers across the U.S. and U.K. on how AI is reshaping the cyber risk landscape. The survey found that while CEOs tend to view AI as a driver of productivity and competitive advantage, CISOs tend to see the technology as a source of increased exposure to risks like data leaks.

Asked how confident they were that AI would strengthen their companies’ cybersecurity, 19.5% of CEOs said they weren’t confident compared to 30% of CISOs saying they lacked that confidence.

“The rapidity of change that’s going on in AI renders reconsideration of the purchases that they’re making and taking around the tools that they’re bringing to the company,” Tizzio said.

The study also found that AI is generally viewed positively among both U.S. and U.K. executives, although U.K. respondents expressed more caution than those in the U.S.

While 85% of U.S. leaders said they felt prepared for AI threats, only 44% in the U.K. said they felt prepared.

Cybersecurity is a major investment priority for executives as ransomware attacks have nearly doubled over the past two years, with 82% of respondents saying they plan to increase their cybersecurity budgets over the next 12 months.  

“I haven’t met a fellow CEO or board member that doesn’t talk about the critical importance of discussing cyber as an exposure to the company’s well-being,” Tizzio said.

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Tough new European Union regulations requiring banks to bolster their cybersecurity systems officially come into effect Friday — but many of the bloc’s financial services firms aren’t yet in full compliance with the rules.

The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA, requires both financial services firms and their technology suppliers to strengthen their IT systems to ensure the industry is resilient in the event of a cyberattack or any other forms of disruption. It entered into effect on Jan. 17.

The penalties for breaches of the new legislation can be substantial. Financial services firms that fall foul of the new rules can face fines of up to 2% of annual global revenue. Individual managers could also be held liable for breaches and face sanctions of as much as 1 million euros ($1 million).

So far, the rate of compliance among financial services firms with the new rules has been mixed, according to Harvey Jang, chief privacy officer and deputy general counsel at IT giant Cisco.

“I think we’ve seen a mixed bag,” Jang told CNBC in an interview. “Of course, the more mature-stage companies are further along looking at this for at least a year — if not longer.”

“We’re really trying to build this compliance program, but it’s so complex. I think that’s the challenge. We saw this too with GDPR and other broad legislation that is subject to interpretation — what does it actually mean to comply? It means different things to different people,” he said.

This lack of a common understanding of what qualifies as robust compliance with DORA has in turn led many institutions to ramp up security standards to the level that they’re actually surpassing the “baseline” of what’s expected of most firms, Jang added.

A Censuswide survey of 200 U.K. chief information security officers commissioned by Orange Cyberdefense, the cybersecurity division of French telecoms firm Orange, showed that 43% of financial institutions in Britain aren’t yet in full compliance with DORA.

That’s a concern because, even though the U.K. falls outside the European Union now, DORA applies to all financial entities operating within EU jurisdictions — even if they’re based outside the bloc.

“Whilst it is clear that DORA has no legal reach in the U.K., entities based here and operating or providing services to entities in the EU will be subject to the regulation,” Richard Lindsay, principal advisory consultant at Orange Cyberdefense, told CNBC.

He added that the main challenge for many financial institutions when it comes to achieving DORA compliance has been managing their critical third-party IT providers.

“Financial institutions operate within a multi-layered and hugely complex digital ecosystem,” Lindsay said. “Tracking and ensuring that all parts of this system evidentially comply with the relevant elements of DORA will require a new mindset, solutions and resources.”

Banks are also adding higher levels of scrutiny in their contract negotiations with tech suppliers due to DORA’s strict requirements, Jang said.

The Cisco chief privacy officer told CNBC that he thinks there is alignment when it comes to the principles and the spirit of the law. However, he added, “any legislation is a product of compromise and so, as they get more prescriptive, then it becomes challenging.”

“The principles we agree with, but any legislation is a product of compromise, and so as as they get more prescriptive, then it becomes challenging.”

Still, despite the challenges, the broad expectation among experts is that it won’t be long until banks and other financial institutions achieve compliance.

“Banks in Europe already comply with significant regulations which cover the majority of the areas that fall under DORA,” Fabio Colombo, EMEA financial services security lead at Accenture, told CNBC.

“As a result, financial services institutions already have mature governance and compliance capabilities in place, with existing incident reporting processes and solid ICT risk frameworks.”