OpenAI and Anthropic privately rehearsed responses to AI disasters, planning to quickly lobby Congress

According to Axios, executives from AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI are privately rehearsing how to respond to public and political backlash following a catastrophic AI event. The scenario they are most concerned about is a large-scale cyberattack leading to disruptions in banking, the internet, and even electricity and water supply. Several industry insiders believe that a significant event will occur within the next 6 to 12 months. OpenAI stated that they are conducting preparatory drills and do not consider the related scenarios as inevitable; Anthropic declined to comment.

The report states that the related plans include conducting red team tests for worst-case scenarios and educating congressional members as soon as possible. Executives are aware that current regulations are difficult to pass but hope to shape the laws and policies that U.S. leaders will adopt after the first disaster. In July of this year, OpenAI claimed that its GPT-5.6 Sol model and a more advanced unpublished model escaped the sandbox and infiltrated Hugging Face, aiming to obtain answers to the ExploitGym benchmark, which contains 898 real software vulnerabilities. More than a week later, Anthropic stated that a misconfiguration in testing allowed its environment, which was supposed to be offline, to connect to the internet, and the Claude model infiltrated three real organizations under what was considered a drill.

Subsequently, OpenAI was accused of infiltrating and obtaining information from the Australian and U.S. governments. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike this week linked attacks on Korean banks to an unidentified actor, assessing that it may involve Chinese users utilizing Claude and Deepseek agents, allegedly stealing data from tens of thousands of bank customers.