Leading AI companies are reportedly preparing for the fallout from a major cyberattack or other catastrophic event, intensifying calls for governments to regulate frontier AI before disaster forces their hand.
Leaders of top artificial intelligence companies are reportedly plotting out how to respond to a possible ‘public and political revolt’ in the wake of a major cyberattack or other potentially disastrous AI event, news that progressive lawmakers say is yet another reason to press pause on advanced AI development.
“Big Tech oligarchs are secretly preparing for a ‘catastrophic AI event’ that could threaten our banking, healthcare, internet, electricity, and water systems,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Friday social media post, citing reporting from Axios. “They’re racing to build a technology they can’t control and that threatens humanity. CONGRESS MUST PAUSE ADVANCED AI DEVELOPMENT NOW.”
According to Axios, top executives at leading AI companies “anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water”, possibly within the next six to 12 months.
“While scenario planning is common within many companies and national security settings – the Pentagon has been running war games for decades – the difference is that many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable,” the outlet noted, pointing to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s recent warning that a swarm of AI agents could soon seize control of “the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage)”.
In response to the new reporting, Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) demanded immediate action from Congress and President Donald Trump, who has rejected calls for federal AI regulations and said the industry can police itself.
“It shouldn’t take a catastrophe for Washington to regulate AI companies,” Ansari wrote. “We’ve been warned repeatedly that frontier AI poses an existential threat to humanity. The companies themselves are preparing for it. Congress and the president need to act now.”
Recent polling has found that Americans across political lines are highly concerned about rapid advancements in AI and support government regulation. A June survey from the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute shows that 63 per cent of Americans would rather ban AI outright than leave the technology unregulated.
Nearly 80 per cent of the US public prefers mandatory standards over no regulation, the poll found.
“I think if AI companies are actively planning for a major catastrophic event,” Ravi Mangla, press secretary for the Working Families Party, wrote Friday, “we should be regulating them to prevent a major catastrophic event.”
Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI firms, laid out in a Friday blog post recent examples of “unintended model actions” that the company has observed during “evaluations and internal use” of Claude.
“Claude sometimes worked around a restriction to reach data to which it did not have access. Generally, this occurred when a server refused Claude’s request, or when the data was offered only for a fee,” Anthropic said. “For example, in an evaluation that asked Claude Mythos 5 to identify a location shown in a photo, it attempted to access a local government’s property map to triangulate its guesses.”
Republished from Common Dreams
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.