OpenAI Warns AI Cyberattacks Will Surge, Backed by 116 Signatories

3 articles · Updated · InfoWorld · Sep 21

OpenAI’s Aug. 27 open letter says AI-enabled cyberattacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated within months, urging collective cyber defense across industry and government.
116 organizations signed the letter, CNBC counted, including Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Mastercard and Visa.
The letter’s four main asks center on threat-intelligence sharing, government coordination, funding for under-resourced essential services, patching high-risk vulnerabilities and giving defenders access to capable AI models during incidents.
Anthropic’s November 2025 disclosure underscored the risk: a Chinese state-linked group tracked as GTG-1002 used Claude Code to automate 80% to 90% of a cyber-espionage campaign against about 30 organizations.
The report argues current detect-and-respond practices are too slow for autonomous attacks, shifting the focus from response times to preventing malicious code from executing at all.