OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft and over 100 tech companies released an open letter Thursday calling for collective action to be taken to prepare “the companies and public services our communities depend on” against AI-enabled cyber attacks that the letter warns will “become far more widespread and sophisticated” moving forward.
“We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses,” the letter states. “In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks 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 letter warns that the ongoing advances in the AI tech space are making it easier and less expensive for hackers to target critical systems and infrastructure points. The letter’s issuers urge vulnerable governments, organizations and companies to “recognize that status quo security won’t be enough” and that “longstanding bugs, excessive permissions, misconfigurations, insecure and unpatched software, weak authentication and technical debt in legacy systems have left systems exposed.”
In order to address that, the letter calls for historically under-resourced security teams to be injected with “cyber-capable AI” and other, new tools and resources. OpenAI, Microsoft and others urge every qualified organization to “make cyber defense an immediate leadership priority,” as well as “fix the highest-risk weaknesses, verify results without disrupting essential services and raise the security bar for what you buy, build and deploy, including AI-generated code.”
In its outlined plan for collective action, the letter insists that cybersecurity companies and partners must “lead the response to defend against sustained AI-enabled attacks.” This includes making “AI-powered defense accessible and deployable for critical-infrastructure operators, with hands-on help to deploy tools and verify fixes, and collaborate with critical infrastructure supply chain manufacturers and system integrators to patch and issue interim guidance.”
The letter also advises the world’s governments to “coordinate cyber defense at local, national and international levels” and “fund cyber defense, starting with essential services that lack the staff or budget to act.” Perhaps most importantly, the call to action notes the importance of governments giving “hospitals, water utilities and local governments access to capable defensive AI, authorized testing and hands-on support through trusted security providers and partners.”
Finally, the letter insists that frontier AI companies, like OpenAI, must “provide responsible model access, significant funding, training and hands-on support,” as well as “share tools, playbooks and credible threat assessments with governments, security partners and open-source maintainers to strengthen preparedness, response and recovery.”
“Cyber capabilities are advancing worldwide, and that can be a net positive: no single company should control the future,” the letter argues. “It also means a global response is necessary, requiring new partnerships to raise security standards and find new solutions to emerging cyber threats.”
“We call on leaders across industry and government to bring the full weight of their technology, resources and expertise to this effort,” the letter concludes. “Put cyber-capable AI in the hands of defenders, starting with the teams protecting essential services. Fix the most dangerous weaknesses, verify the fixes and share what works so others can build on it. Together, we can turn today’s AI advances into lasting improvements in security that benefit everyone.”
The letter’s release, notably, comes at a time when cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common. Most recently, U.S. water facilities across at least a dozen states were hit by a wave of cyberattacks that experts believe may be linked to the ongoing war in Iran.
In a video released this week, Microsoft founder Bill Gates warned that AI is “both the most powerful tool for advancing equity and the greatest threat to equity that humans have ever invented.” The billionaire added, “I worry that we aren’t preparing. There’s no plan to ease the entry into the AI era and not even a plan to have a plan.”
You can check out the video yourself below.
