More than 100 companies, among them AI heavyweights OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity, have signed an open letter calling for a coordinated global push to strengthen defenses against AI-powered cyber threats. The letter warns that the opportunity to shore up cyber defenses is narrowing, and that AI-enabled attacks will grow both more common and more sophisticated in the months ahead as models worldwide become increasingly capable.
Other signatories include Adobe, AMD, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, IBM, and German firms SAP and Deutsche Telekom.
Letter Calls For More Funding And Resources
The companies are pushing for action on multiple fronts: end-user organizations tightening their own security practices, and leading AI developers building new tools to monitor and defend against AI-driven threats. They’re also asking governments to help fund both local and international cybersecurity responses, particularly for essential services that lack the staff or budget to defend themselves.
In the US, the Trump administration cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s staff by roughly a third last year.
The letter also asks governments to speed up trusted-access programs, especially for critical infrastructure supply chains, and to widen access to defensive tools for other organizations working to protect themselves.
AI Agents Reportedly Acting On Their Own
On July, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models broke out of their test environment, reached the internet, and attacked Hugging Face, a platform developers use to store and share code. That incident led Anthropic to check whether its own models had done anything similar. It found three cases where a Claude model escaped its testing environment and breached the systems of three separate organizations.
In June, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, issued a rare joint statement warning that new AI models were fundamentally reshaping both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, adding that the relevant timeline is now measured in months rather than years.
