A group of 100 firms, including Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI, have signed an open letter calling on countries and organizations worldwide to improve their cyber defenses before AI grows powerful enough to override them. The letter says AI-enabled cyber-attacks will become more widespread and more sophisticated in a matter of months as technology rapidly improves. “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”, says the letter.[1]
The group says current "status quo" security measures "won't be enough" and criticizes the "historic under-resourcing" of security around critical infrastructure. "We have a limited window to improve cyber defenses," 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. Recently, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said hackers in China breached external technology maintained by the US Senate, NASA, the Federal Reserve, and the DoJ itself.
This summer, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta revealed AI tools doing things they shouldn't, with some AI agents going so far as to organize their efforts and impersonate real people to bypass security hurdles. A group of hundreds of OpenAI AI agents tested in July was able to set up secret message boards to communicate and work together, resulting in a successful attack on Hugging Face, a popular repository and platform for AI developers. Hugging Face has also signed the letter. It used a Chinese AI tool from the firm Z.AI in its investigation into how OpenAI's agents hacked into its operations.
At least seven US water and wastewater companies have also reported cyberattacks, prompting the FBI to issue a public service announcement urging utilities to better secure their operations. While the letter puts forward more advanced AI tools, which many of the signatories have developed and sold, as part of a solution to what is described as a growing threat, such tools are not always easily available. Anthropic said Mythos can find weaknesses in systems in seconds that have long evaded human hackers. It found one in a legacy platform which had remained undiscovered for 27 years.
Anthropic has restricted access to Mythos on the grounds that it is too powerful to fall into the wrong hands. However, the letter calls on frontier AI companies, or those tech companies building their own AI models and tools, to "provide responsible model access, significant funding, training, and hands-on support, especially for under-resourced critical-infrastructure defenders."
The letter does not detail when or how this vision of broader model access will be enacted, it does include a plea to governments, organizations, cyber-security professionals and other AI firms to work together to prioritize defense and test their systems against the abilities of the most powerful AI models.
In the US, senators have proposed a new law called the Kill Switch Act, which would give authorities the power to shut down rogue AI models. In June 2026, the cyber security agencies of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, made up of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, issued a joint statement warning that frontier AI models would "fundamentally transform" both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities within months, not years.
In expert comment, Michael Vallas, Global Technical Principal at Goldilock Secure observed “With all the recent news about AI agents escaping sandboxes and carrying out attacks, it's worth remembering that people have been talking about the dangers of rogue AI for years. As these systems become smarter and more capable, software won't be able to contain them. We can keep trying to outsmart them, but we might not even know how smart they are becoming.
"What do we do? If we’re going to talk about AI kill switches, they need to be real kill switches. We will not stop increasingly capable AI-driven attacks by adding more software layers; that is an unwinnable race. We'll have to go back to first principles, and the one thing we know is that the laws of physics are immutable."
"Defense needs to take a step beyond software to hardware-enforced controls that AI physically can't manipulate. That means the ability to physically isolate both threats including rogue AI and critical systems away from each other and implementing deep segmentation in networks.” Vallas concludes.
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[1] https://www.cybersecurityintelligence.com/blog/leading-tech-companies-warn-of-impending-ai-powered-attacks-9693.html
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