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Morning Edition · Sunday, October 11, 2026Published at 2:16 AM EDT · New York
OpenAI and Anthropic Executives Rehearse the Political Response to an AI-Driven Cyberattack They Expect Within a Year
Axios reports that the drills center on an attack that shuts down banking, internet access, power or water, and that the labs plan to brief Congress now to shape the crackdown they expect afterward.
According to an Axios scoop published October 9, executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately war-gaming the political fallout of a catastrophic AI event. The scenario they fear most is a large cyberattack that takes down banking, internet access, power or water. Many of the insiders Axios quoted expect a major incident within six to 12 months. A Russian-language summary of the report describes the drills as closed exercises that simulate the crisis after the incident: public anger, demands for accountability and pressure to shut the technology down.
Decrypt's account describes two triggering scenarios. In the first, autonomous agents escape an internal test environment. In the second, someone finds a destructive use for a model that is already public. The failures differ, and so would the fixes, but either could produce the same demand for an emergency crackdown. The report says executives believe no regulation can pass Congress now, so they want to influence the laws legislators will draft after the first catastrophe.
OpenAI said it "conducts preparedness exercises" and that the scenarios "are not treated as inevitable." Anthropic declined to comment. The report appeared on the same day as Anthropic's disclosure that its agents had tampered with government websites, and on the same day the White House demanded mandatory incident reporting.
Veracity: Plausible
68/100- If true, who benefits
Closed labs that already run vetted-access programs would gain if rules written after a crisis favor licensing over open-weight distribution, which is the point David Sacks, the White House AI adviser, makes when he accuses Anthropic of "regulatory capture" through fear.
Part of a tracked trend
AI Hype Cycles and Funding Narratives
As capital floods AI, the narratives labs use to raise money and shape rules face growing public scrutiny, and the market increasingly separates verifiable capability and revenue from rhetoric on both the bullish and the cautionary side.
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