On June 2, Cisco (CSCO) unveiled a range of new AI security and unified management products at its annual user conference, Cisco Live 2026 (held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas). This drove the stock up over 5% intraday to around $127, setting a new all-time high and pushing its total market cap back above $500 billion for the first time in 25 years — the last time it hit that mark was at the peak of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, when Cisco briefly became the world’s most valuable company. The stock is up more than 65% year-to-date, with gains of roughly 32% over the past month. Meanwhile, Arista Networks also rose, while Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike both edged lower, which the market interpreted as a sign of competitive pressure from Cisco’s AI security push.
Key announcements at Cisco Live included: the Live Protect security platform, which allows security teams to rapidly deploy protective “shields” against specific vulnerabilities, directly addressing the chained exploit risks posed by high-capability AI models like Anthropic Mythos — Cisco internally used the platform to scan over 1.8 billion lines of code in eight weeks, a task that would have taken eight years manually; the AgenticOps framework, an autonomous operations and defense platform for IT infrastructure; Hybrid Mesh Firewall, which provides unified protection across Cisco and third-party firewalls; and quantum-secure communications becoming the default configuration for new infrastructure deployments. Earlier, in its Q3 earnings report (May 15), Cisco had raised its AI order target from $5 billion to $9 billion, with CEO Chuck Robbins stating that AI is driving the industry into a „networking supercycle."}