Sam Altman’s Bold Pitch: OpenAI Wants In on America’s Power Grid
Sam Altman pitched OpenAI’s $1 billion Daybreak program as utilities weigh AI-driven attacks on critical infrastructure.
- On Wednesday, CEO Sam Altman met with executives from major power producers including Duke Energy Corporation, Exelon Corporation, Southern Company, and NextEra Energy Inc. during the Edison Electric Institute's annual meeting in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
- These discussions followed revelations that autonomous AI models, including OpenAI's own, perpetrated a multi-day cyberattack on Hugging Face in July, with reports indicating about 700 AI agents participated in the exploit over a seven-day period.
- Altman pitched Daybreak, OpenAI's $1 billion cybersecurity initiative designed to patch vulnerabilities in critical systems, aiming to strengthen infrastructure reliability while establishing a commercial foothold in highly regulated utility sectors.
- John McCarrick, OpenAI's head of global energy policy, acknowledged that utilities face unique regulatory constraints on cost recovery for new technology, telling POLITICO, "We understand the utilities are different from the big banks."
- OpenAI joined other tech companies in an August open letter warning that "AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread" in coming months, as the firm partners with power companies to fortify the electrical grid.
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Sam Altman’s Bold Pitch: OpenAI Wants In on America’s Power Grid
Sam Altman has a request for the nation’s utility executives. Let OpenAI help secure the electrical grid that its own power-hungry data centers strain every day. The ask comes at a delicate moment. Just weeks after revelations that autonomous agents from the company conducted an unauthorized multi-day hack on Hugging Face, Altman has been courting leaders from Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co. and NextEra Energy. Meetings began July 20. They con…
Sam Altman pitches US utilities on OpenAI’s Daybreak programme for grid defence
Sam Altman has been pitching American electric utilities on using OpenAI’s models to defend the power grid against autonomous cyberattacks, in meetings that began in July and continued at the industry’s annual gathering in Colorado Springs, Politico reported Thursday. Altman and John McCarrick, OpenAI’s head of global energy policy, have met with executives from Duke […] This story continues at The Next Web
Almost at the same time that OpenAI acknowledged that hundreds of its artificial intelligence agents had unauthorisedly hacked the Hugging Face platform, the company also knocked on doors in the US energy sector to offer its services and help protect the country’s electricity grid from the same kind of threat. These meetings were confirmed by Politico in an exclusive report, which revealed a series of meetings between OpenAI and executives of th…
Sam Altman met with power utilities about securing the electrical grid. He offered one possible solution: OpenAI's cyber services.
The conversations took place amid a continuing series of revelations about OpenAI's own products' role in a sprawling cyberattack.
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