100 Major Tech Companies Call for Global Defense Surge to Combat AI Cyberattacks

A group of leading tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, and Amazon, called for a worldwide defensive surge to prepare for an incoming barrage of cyberattacks perpetrated by artificial intelligence (AI).

The tech giants, along with more than 100 other companies, issued a joint letter on Aug. 27 warning that in the coming months “AI-enabled cyberattacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable.”

“The companies and public services our communities depend on—from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet—are at risk,” the companies wrote.

“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.”

Other tech and financial firms that signed onto the letter include Visa, Mastercard, IBM, Capital One, Cloudflare, Broadcom, CrowdStrike, General Motors, Oracle, Robinhood, and Shopify.

The letter warned that “we have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses.”

To combat the incoming wave of AI-powered cyberattacks, the companies proposed a worldwide collective response, as well as allowing certain companies to access more powerful models before the general public.

The letter also urged businesses to make cyber defense an “immediate leadership priority” and to raise security standards to meet the capabilities of frontier AI.

Governments should “coordinate cyber defense at local, national, and international levels,” increase funding for cyber defense, and give “hospitals, water utilities, and local governments access to capable defensive AI, authorized testing, and hands-on support through trusted security providers and partners,” the companies wrote.

The joint letter comes on the heels of the first fully autonomous AI-powered cyberattack, when an OpenAI model broke out of a testing sandbox in late July and hacked Hugging Face, an open-source community for AI and machine learning.

Using chains of zero-day exploits, the model freed itself from OpenAI’s testing environment, gained internet access, and breached Hugging Face’s software infrastructure.

“This is some of the clearest evidence yet that an AI model can run a complete cyberattack from start to finish without a human steering it,” Andrew Jones, co-founder and chief product officer at cybersecurity firm Adaptive Security, told The Epoch Times shortly after the breach occurred.

Late last month, Anthropic announced that its Claude chatbot had accessed the internet in three separate instances during evaluations in a testing sandbox.

Anthropic had intended for Claude to operate in a simulated environment with no access to the internet, but a “misunderstanding” between Anthropic and its “evaluation partner” led to Claude gaining internet access.

Since then, a Meta AI model was also able to breach another company during a cybersecurity test by accessing the internet, making it the third major AI hacking event.

The Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council (FIORC), an alliance of intelligence and security agencies from the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, issued a joint statement on June 22 warning that AI models would be able to breach and overwhelm the cybersecurity defenses of governments and businesses worldwide in a matter of months.

“Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years; it is months,” the statement said.