A group of 100 firms, including Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, have signed an open letter calling on countries and organisations around the world to beef up their cyber defences before AI grows powerful enough to override them.
The letter warns cyber-attacks which use AI will become both more widespread and more sophisticated in a matter of months as the technology rapidly improves.
The group says current ‘status quo’ security measures ‘won’t be enough’ and criticises the ‘historic under-resourcing’ of security around critical infrastructure. “We have a limited window to improve cyber defences,” the letter begins.
Other firms to have signed the letter include banks such as Capital One, payment processors MasterCard and Visa, and other major tech firms including Adobe, Oracle and IBM.
They call on governments to provide “capable, defensive AI” and testing to hospitals and water utilities, and on technology companies to aid such efforts.
Collectively, tech and government “should bring the full weight of their technology, resources, and expertise to this effort”, according to the letter.
The letter comes after a string of significant hacking and cybersecurity breaches have been made public.
This week, the US Department of Justice said hackers in China breached technology maintained by the US Senate, Nasa, the Federal Reserve, and the DoJ itself.
This summer has seen OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all reveal their AI tools doing things they should not, with some AI agents going so far as to organise their efforts and impersonate real people in order to get past security hurdles.
A group of hundreds of OpenAI AI agents being tested in July were able to set up secret message boards to communicate with each other and work together, resulting in a successful attack on Hugging Face, a popular repository and platform for AI developers.
The incident has been described as the world’s first AI-enabled cyber-attack.
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