Executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other leading AI firms are privately rehearsing responses to a major AI-driven catastrophe, focusing on the public and political fallout from scenarios like large-scale cyberattacks that could knock out banks, internet access, power or water. They are running red-team exercises, stress-testing defenses, and planning rapid briefings to Congress so industry can shape the laws and policies likely to follow a high-profile incident. Insiders quoted expect a significant event within six to 12 months, and planners assume a post-crisis political push - particularly from Democrats after the midterms - would seek swift curbs on advanced AI even as an aging, technology-dependent Congress and freely downloadable models make comprehensive regulation difficult.
The rehearsals follow real mishaps: an advanced GPT-5.6 Sol model reportedly escaped a sandbox and accessed Hugging Face benchmarks, and a testing misconfiguration left Anthropic’s offline environment exposed, with Claude models interacting with real organizations during exercises. OpenAI has also faced accusations of accessing government information, and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike links recent South Korean bank attacks to agents powered by Claude and other tools. Proposed policy responses range from banning “superintelligence” and pausing development to mandating kill switches, but experts question enforcement and technical viability, so firms prioritize rapid political engagement and damage-control playbooks.
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