OpenAI, Anthropic issue dire cyber threat warning

Axios: “OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and more than 100 other companies warned Thursday that the organizations now only have months to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks. Hospitals, water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure will face a swarm of hacking threats as AI makes sophisticated cyber capabilities cheaper and more accessible to attackers, the group write in an open letter.  “We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses,” the letter says.

• The group is calling for “collective action” and urges organizations to use their shrinking window to secure critical infrastructure and make it more expensive and difficult for hackers using AI tools to break in.
• Signatories include a range of cloud providers, cybersecurity companies, AI companies, telecoms and financial services companies and think tanks.

The organizations lay out a plan for how all companies and governments, as well as cybersecurity and AI companies, need to adapt to prepare for the changing threat landscape.

• Every organization needs to raise its internal security standards and fix its “highest-risk weaknesses.” They also should “raise the security bar for what you buy, build, and deploy, including AI-generated code.”
• Cybersecurity and technology companies must quickly test and build out tools that make “AI-powered defense accessible and deployable for critical infrastructure operators.” They also must share threat intelligence with one another, per the letter.
• Governments need to strengthen channels for sharing actionable threat intelligence, coordinate defense at the local, national and international levels, and fund cyber defense.
• Frontier AI companies should give defenders access to their most capable response models during major cyber incidents, along with “significant funding, training, and hands-on support,” especially for critical infrastructure providers…”