We recently compiled a list of the 15 AI Stocks to Watch: News and Analyst Ratings. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) stands against the other AI stocks.
As the “AI arms race” continues to evolve, countries are increasingly beginning to realize the efforts they need to expend to stay relevant. One such country in the picture that’s stepping up its efforts is Britain. On Monday, November 25, British cabinet office minister Pat McFadden warned that Russian cyber criminals are increasingly targeting countries that support Ukraine, directing that Britain and its NATO allies must stay ahead in the AI arms race. He also stated that neither Britain nor its allies will be intimidated by Russian cyber threats to stop supporting Ukraine.
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The remarks, given at the NATO Cyber Defence Conference in London, also unveil Britain’s plans to set up a new Laboratory for AI (artificial intelligence) security to help create better cyber defense tools and organize intelligence on attacks. McFadden also emphasized businesses and institutions to do “everything they can to lock their digital doors” to protect themselves from what he called an increasingly aggressive Russia.
“While no one should underestimate the Russian aggressive and reckless cyber threat to NATO, we will not be intimidated by it and we will never allow it to dictate our decisions or policies. And we will do everything we can to defend our countries against it”.
McFadden will be sitting down with British businesses to discuss how they can boost their security in a few days.
In other AI news, lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News have revealed that OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to a case their company was being sued on. News publishers The New York Times and Daily News had filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI. The legal proceedings required OpenAI to let the publishers look through its training datasets for any copyrighted content.
The search, which started on November 1st took a turn on November 14 when lawyers for the publishers alleged that search data stored on one of the virtual machines (after 150 hours of work) had vanished. While some data was recovered, it was without names and folder structure. The lawyers said it “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles were used to build [OpenAI’s] models”.
“News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time…The news plaintiffs learned only yesterday that the recovered data is unusable and that an entire week’s worth of its experts’ and lawyers’ work must be re-done, which is why this supplemental letter is being filed today”.
-Lawyers said in a letter filed in a US district court on Wednesday, November 20.
OpenAI has been facing multiple lawsuits from publishers related to copyright infringement, even though it stands firm that it only trains its AI models on publicly available data.
For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A cutting-edge computer lab full of IT experts monitoring the security of multiple systems.
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 64
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) is a leader in AI-powered cybersecurity.
On November 22, Argus raised the firm’s price target on Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) to $443 from $400 and kept a “Buy” rating on the shares. The rating comes after the AI-powered cybersecurity company reported that its total revenue for the fiscal first quarter of 2025 grew by 14% year over year to $2.1 billion, compared with total revenue of $1.9 billion in the year-ago period. The firm states that Palo Alto is a “strong competitor in the highly fragmented but rapidly growing enterprise cybersecurity space”, and raised the firm’s FY25 and FY26 non-GAAP EPS estimates to $6.40 and $7.12, respectively.
Overall PANW ranks 9th on our list of the AI stocks to watch. While we acknowledge the potential of PANW as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than PANW but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
