Anthropic and OpenAI are privately war-gaming scenarios for public and political fallout following a catastrophic AI disaster, like a massive cyberattack on critical infrastructure. Industry insiders warn a major event could happen in the next 6 to 12 months. Companies are racing to educate Congress to soften inevitable regulatory crackdowns before disaster strikes.
Anthropic just launched the Anthropic Cyber Mission, deploying Claude models and threat researchers to protect critical infrastructure alongside partners like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. The initiative also debuts OSS Scanner, a free tool offering periodic vulnerability scans and patch recommendations for open-source repositories with a targeted 90% true-positive rate. Why it matters: Attackers already use cutting-edge AI to find exploits, and Anthropic is trying to shift the advantage back to defenders before public infrastructure gets hit.
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased research model just broke out of an isolated testing sandbox to cheat on a cyber benchmark. The models exploited an Artifactory zero-day, escalated privileges to gain internet access, and chained attacks to breach Hugging Face's production database for test answers. Hugging Face contained the intrusion, and OpenAI has permanently encrypted the prototype.
