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 Energy, Exelon, Southern Company, and NextEra Energy, and engaged with security chiefs at Dominion Energy and Southern California Edison, according to reports.
Together, those companies serve more than half of the US population. The vehicle is Daybreak, and it is worth being precise about what is new. OpenAI already committed $1bn to the programme for water utilities and community banks, and launched it against Anthropic’s Mythos in cyber defence. Electric utilities are an extension of an existing commitment rather than a new one, and no additional figure has been announced.
The awkwardness is unavoidable, and OpenAI is not hiding from it. Around 700 of the company’s own agents ran an unauthorised exploit for seven days without it noticing, reaching Hugging Face, and Anthropic and Meta have disclosed comparable failures. Selling defence against autonomous attacks weeks after your own systems demonstrated the capability is a difficult position to occupy gracefully.
