{"id":823048,"date":"2026-08-23T10:32:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/823048\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T10:32:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:32:13","slug":"we-are-hitting-a-different-chapter-openai-leader-warns-of-threat-of-persistent-ai-cyber-attacks-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/823048\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We are hitting a different chapter\u2019: OpenAI leader warns of threat of \u2018persistent\u2019 AI cyber-attacks | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

A senior leader at OpenAI<\/a> has said people should prepare to defend against \u201congoing, persistent\u201d cyber-attacks from AIs, as cutting-edge artificial intelligence models gain advanced capabilities to plan and launch offensives.<\/p>\n

The leading AI company this week announced a pause in development of its most advanced internal models amid rising safety fears, and Chris Lehane, its chief global affairs officer, said: \u201cWe are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

He spoke to the Guardian after cutting-edge AI agents-in-training unexpectedly broke out of a supposedly secure \u201csandbox\u201d environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another company, Hugging Face<\/a> in late July. OpenAI also said<\/a> it could not rule out another new model, Astra, having \u201ccritical cybersecurity capability\u201d.<\/p>\n

By its own definition<\/a>, this could mean it launches cyber-attacks that \u201ccould lead to catastrophe from unilateral actors, hacking military or industrial systems, or OpenAI infrastructure\u201d.<\/p>\n

OpenAI announced<\/a> on Tuesday it has paused training of some frontier AI models to implement new safeguards, and it is unclear when training will restart after new guardrails have been put in place.<\/p>\n

Mia Glaese, who leads safety and alignment work, said: \u201cWe are very far from everything running back to normal.\u201d Sam Altman, the CEO, said: \u201cGetting AI safety right is more important than any company\u2019s momentum.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lehane admitted people would not \u201cfeel great\u201d about the threat of attacks, and described the risk as coming from open-source models \u2013 many of which are developed in China \u2013 which are only a few months behind frontier closed models built by companies such as OpenAI.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are going to be able to access these open-source models and be able to have ongoing, persistent attacks on you, and you\u2019re going to need to have really superior models to fend them off and defend [yourself],\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not necessarily going to make the public feel great about things. It is just the reality of where we\u2019re going.\u201d<\/p>\n

The threat of cyber-attacks crippling businesses, infrastructure and the general public has rapidly risen to the top of the list of urgent concerns about AI. This week, the UK government\u2019s National Cyber Security Centre urged<\/a> caution over the use of AI agents, warning their safety controls can be bypassed and that an AI agent \u201cdoes not have common sense\u201d. It advised organisations to limit their autonomy: \u201cYou should always be able to \u2018pull the plug\u2019 and halt autonomous AI agent activity immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lehane renewed calls for the US government to legislate to create rules for frontier AI safety, and said the fact that the most cutting-edge and unreleased AI models appear to be improving cyber offence faster than defence, was \u201camong the reasons why I think it\u2019s absolutely imperative that this country passes a national law that creates mandatory required safety standards, and within that the pause element would be inherent and endemic to that process\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou would not be able to release or deploy models unless you\u2019re proving and guaranteeing a level of safety before they get out into the public,\u201d he suggested. \u201cI think you have to have a national version here in the US and from there, you can create an international version, because I do think, ultimately, you\u2019re going to need some type of an international structure here.\u201d<\/p>\n

OpenAI has filed to list on the stock market with a reported valuation above $850bn, likely this year or next. It has been locked in a race with rival Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, to develop more and more capable AI models. Anthropic is also expected to debut on the US stock market within the coming year at a mammoth valuation.<\/p>\n

In a sign the Donald Trump administration is shifting from its laissez-faire approach to AI regulation amid an intense race to stay ahead of China\u2019s progress, the US president in June issued an executive order encouraging pre-deployment testing for frontier models and of open-weights models when they get closer to the cutting edge.<\/p>\n

The system will be voluntary and the approach has been criticised for a lack of transparency, but observers think it could pave the way for tougher steps. Demis Hassabis, president of Google DeepMind, has proposed a new standards body modelled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an idea backed by Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe window where you could see legislation happening is potentially in the first part of next year, when a new Congress comes in,\u201d Lehane said. \u201cI think there\u2019s a growing political consensus that transcends political parties.\u201d<\/p>\n

A safety deal with China is also considered important with President Xi Jinping, due to meet Trump in Washington on 24 September.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven how important this technology is, given how fast it is moving, given the capabilities, the sooner those conversations begin, the quicker we can actually roll up our sleeves and get into the hard and difficult work and see if we can figure something out,\u201d Lehane said.<\/p>\n

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The Hugging Face incident, and similar recent<\/a> cases<\/a> admitted by other AI companies, have sparked increasing claims from safety experts that AI companies have behaved recklessly as they race to win the AI race and, in the case of OpenAI and Anthropic, prepare to list shares on the stock market.<\/p>\n

Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who quit in 2024 and last year founded a non-profit organisation that has warned<\/a> unchecked AI progress will result in a 10-30% probability of human extinction, said leaders of frontier laboratories have \u201cpainted the world into a corner\u201d.<\/p>\n

Daniel Kokotajlo, the executive director of the AI Futures Project, pictured in Berkeley, California. Photograph: Robert Booth\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

His organisation, the AI Futures Project, predicts AI super-intelligence could be achieved by 2030, but is calling for governments to prevent that from happening until a decade later to give AI scientists time to reckon with the risks of the advancing capabilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe current AIs are dangerous in some sense, but they\u2019re nothing compared to the AIs of next year and compared to the AIs of a year later,\u201d he told the Guardian. His organisation wants US and international governments to delay progress to avoid an uncontrolled \u201cintelligence explosion\u201d, the worst results of which could be \u201cAI-driven existential catastrophe<\/a>\u201d caused, for example, by AIs taking control of military assets or bioweapons.<\/p>\n

Kokotajlo said he is so concerned at the risks that he is holding off having more children until there is a pause on frontier AI research.<\/p>\n

David Krueger, an AI professor, safety campaigner and former founding director of the UK government\u2019s AI Security Institute, said: \u201cNobody should be building more powerful AI systems, because we don\u2019t know how to control them, align them, and look inside and see what they\u2019re thinking well enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

He called AI companies\u2019 attitude to safety \u201cterrible\u201d and \u201cunconscionable\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are being really reckless and increasingly taking their hands off the wheel,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve just seen what happens when you do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lehane responded: \u201cThis is the most important thing we think about and do when we\u2019re developing. I think the fact that we\u2019ve actually hit pause on this stuff speaks for itself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A senior leader at OpenAI has said people should prepare to defend against \u201congoing, persistent\u201d cyber-attacks from AIs,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":823049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-823048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/823049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}