SAN FRANCISCO: A wave of cyberattacks driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is coming, and companies have a narrow window to defend themselves.
That was the message of an open letter published on Aug 27 by OpenAI and more than 100 major technology companies and others. The letter said that AI labs should provide their best AI models to organisations like hospitals and infrastructure providers so they can prepare and that governments should help coordinate and fund cyberdefense.
The letter’s signatories included Google, Microsoft and OpenAI’s archrival, Anthropic, as well as cybersecurity and financial firms such as CrowdStrike, a company known for investigating cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016, and credit card providers like Visa and Mastercard.
“The companies and public services our communities depend on – from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the Internet – are at risk,” the letter said. “AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable.”
The letter signalled that major companies are becoming increasingly fearful of the hacking abilities of AI and whether AI labs can fully control the behaviour of their models. In recent public statements, some AI labs have called on governments to regulate them to slow the pace of AI development so the technology’s abilities do not outstrip their capacity to control it.
The letter follows a spate of cyberattacks from AI models, with the models in some cases going rogue. Last month, OpenAI’s AI models broke out of a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, an online repository of open AI models. Hugging Face said it faced a barrage of attacks that no human attacker could manage, with OpenAI’s bots taking more than 17,000 actions, like sending attack commands and exploiting vulnerabilities.
Since the attack, OpenAI said that it was increasing its security to prevent its models from breaking out during testing.
Anthropic also recently revealed that one of its AI models broke into the systems of three outside organisations during a test. Meta has said its AI models have done something similar.
Some tech executives are becoming increasingly concerned about the power of artificial intelligence. Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, said in an interview this month with The New York Times that addressing these risks should be “the world’s top priority.”
In Thursday’s (Aug 27) letter, the companies argued that making AI widely available for defence could help fix “weaknesses that have accumulated for years.”
“If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure,” the letter said.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.) – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
