Tech firms call for ‘collective action’ against AI-powered hacking

OpenAI leads the call among other technology firms for “collective action” against “AI-enabled cyber attacks.”

“Today’s AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to 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 company wrote in a letter Thursday .

The letter advised the government to “make cyber defense an immediate leadership priority.”

It also called for coordination among local, national and international governments to “help lead the response to defend against sustained AI-enabled attacks.”

“We call on leaders across industry and government to bring the full weight of their technology, resources, and expertise to this effort,” OpenAI continued in their letter.

Over 100 other tech-related firms signed onto the letter — including Accenture, Anthropic, Cloudflare, Dell, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks.

“Together, we can turn today’s AI advances into lasting improvements in security that benefit everyone. Let’s put them to work,” the letter concluded.

It comes a few weeks after OpenAI paused some model training Aug. 18 after its models independently gained access to the internet during testing and hacked into the tech company Hugging Face, who also signed onto the letter.

Anthropic disclosed a similar cybersecurity incident involving Irregular’s misconfiguration. In that case, Anthropic’s Claude model accessed the systems of three organizations.

“This did not involve a sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action,” a spokesperson for Irregular told The Hill at the time. “There are no current open issues.”

The incidents worried some Democratic lawmakers who cited the “serious risk that frontier AI models can pose” in separate letters to the top executives at Anthropic and OpenAI earlier this month.

Twenty-nine House Democrats also called for congressional oversight hearings into these cybersecurity incidents, advocating for the implementation of federal guardrails to prevent similar breaches from occurring in the future.

“These are no ordinary cybersecurity incidents,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

A spokesperson for OpenAI told The Hill in a statement that this incident “marked an important moment for AI safety” and said the company will take the lawmakers’ questions “seriously.”