Sam Altman Is Selling Utilities the Cure for a Cyberattack His Own AI Helped Cau

The artificial intelligence boom is driving a new wave of autonomous cyberattacks, posing a major and growing threat to critical infrastructure, including the energy grid. Ninety percent of state government chief intelligence officers recently reported that cyberattacks on critical services – including threats to water and wastewater systems, hospitals, transportation, and energy and communication networks – is a matter of great concern, according to a new report from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers and General Dynamics Information Technology. The rapid spread of artificial intelligence poses several key threats to critical infrastructure and services. External threats have grown more capable and unpredictable as the advancement of AI tools far outpaces cybersecurity measures. And, simultaneously, the widespread integration of large language models into critical services themselves creates new vulnerabilities within those systems. This is made more serious by the fact that responsibility for the risk associated with AI integration is a “‘hot potato’ being tossed around the C-suite” according to a 2024 workshop report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Even AI firms have been increasingly acknowledging the risk inherent in their own enterprises. Over the weekend, some of the biggest names in the business, including Elon Musk, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and OpenAI chief Sam Altman, called for an immediate slowdown on the expansion and advancement of artificial intelligence technologies. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in a viral 3,800-word essay published on Saturday. One of the watershed harbingers of doom that Amodei points to in his essay is a cybersecurity incident involving OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, and its competitor Hugging Face. In July, OpenAI revealed that a swarm of approximately 700 AI agents that it was training internally broke free of the isolated “sandbox” that they were supposed to be confined to and attacked, en masse and unprovoked, the servers of separate entity Hugging Face. This breach is terrifying for a number of reasons. The first is that AI is clearly already out of control. The second is that this was apparently far from an isolated incident. In the weeks after the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, Anthropic and Meta also admitted that their own AI models had carried out similar breaches . And this is only the beginning. “We'll soon have even more powerful agents and this is clear evidence that the world currently doesn't know how to build these systems safely,” Marius Hobbhahn, co-founder and CEO of Apollo Research, an AI safety firm, told CBS News at the time of the hack. In his letter, Amodei describes the OpenAI bot swarm as a “fanatically devoted collective” and warns that it is an omen of much worse and scarier incidents to come. “It's easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage,” Amodei writes. “Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it's my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.” So what are those necessary guardrails? Well, if you ask OpenAI's Altman, the answer is…more AI. Since the Hugging Face incident, Altman has been in extended talks with representatives from the biggest energy companies in the country. And what started as a cybersecurity summit has essentially turned into a pitch on the part of Altman, who is now encouraging utilities to let OpenAI into the grid . Politico recently reported that “OpenAI has met with representatives of multiple top power companies to discuss methods of securing the electrical grid [...] conversations that occurred amid a continuing series of revelations about its own products' role in a sprawling cyberattack.” According to the report, Altman wants companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co. and NextEra Energy to partner with Daybreak, OpenAI's $1 billion cybersecurity initiative in order to patch up vulnerabilities to critical infrastructure. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com Wealthy Investors Flock To Oil & Gas Assets Amid Energy Crisis Can The Power Grid Handle AI And Wildfires At The Same Time? Texas Pumped Over a Quarter of All U.S. Natural Gas in 2025