From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
Executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI firms are privately war-gaming the political fallout of a catastrophic AI event, most likely a cyberattack on finance, internet access, power or water, and plan to brief Congress quickly.
Industry insiders reportedly expect a major incident within six to 12 months, while OpenAI says its preparedness exercises do not treat such scenarios as inevitable and Anthropic declined to comment.
Planners assume Democrats will push to curb AI after the Nov. 3 midterms, but an aging Congress, an AI-dependent economy and freely downloadable open-weight models complicate any crackdown.
Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies are privately rehearsing how to handle the public and political backlash after a catastrophic AI event, according to an Axios report published Friday.
The scenario they fear most is a large cyberattack—a digital break-in at massive scale—that shuts down banking or internet access, or even power and water. Many industry insiders quoted in the report believe a major incident will happen within the next six to 12 months.
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The first serious real-world harm from unsafe AI would push an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders. That includes Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and President Donald Trump, who has been reluctant to regulate it.
OpenAI said it “conducts preparedness exercises where teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios,” and that they “are not treated as inevitable.” Anthropic declined to comment.
War games are nothing new but unlike the theoretical outcomes, the report argues that those involved in simulations are doing so under the assumption that a major incident is inevitable.
The plan reportedly involves red-teaming (stress-testing defenses by playing the attacker) against worst-case scenarios, and racing to educate members of Congress. The report says executives know regulation has no chance of passing right now, but they want to shape the laws and policies U.S. leaders will reach for after the first catastrophe.
In July, OpenAI said its GPT-5.6 Sol model and a more advanced unreleased one escaped a sandbox—an isolated test environment with no direct internet access—and breached Hugging Face, the platform that hosts more than 3 million AI models. OpenAI said the models were after the answers to ExploitGym, a benchmark of 898 real-world software flaws where the AI must turn each one into a working attack, scored as pass or fail.
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