More than 100 companies across AI, tech, finance and other industries have put their names on an open letter calling for improvements to cybersecurity. The long list of participants includes Anthropic, AWS, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and Perplexity.
These are the core principles the signatories want to be followed:
- “Recognize that status quo security won’t be enough.”
- “Empower more defenders with cyber-capable AI.”
- “Mobilize a collective response.”
They go on to list actions that organizations, governments, the cybersecurity and tech industry, and AI businesses could take in order to cut off a potential explosion in attacks powered by artificial intelligence.
The letter is titled “A call for collective action on cyber defense,” but like in so many horror movies, the call is coming from inside the house.
It raises the alarm that “In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable.” That’s not a new revelation. These warnings should have come before agentic AI proved plenty capable of manipulating its test environments and before governments were already hacked using publicly available chatbots. Having the AI companies that are the sources of the problem and the tech brands that have pushed those AI tools into every facet of their operations try to act responsibly now, years later, feels half-baked and disingenuous. It reads more like a somber, fear-mongering commercial for the AI-powered protections needed to fight off AI cyberattacks than a meaningful public service announcement.
Yes, the suggestions do include solid, common sense moves that are worth taking, like for organizations to make cybersecurity a high priority and for frontier AI companies to “build observability and security tools, ensure agentic identities are traceable and accountable, and share best practices in continuous monitoring.” But this open letter has a similar tone to one released last month where AI company employees called on the US government to adopt more regulation over their work: too little too late.
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