OpenAI Exec Tells People to Expect Routine AI-Driven Cyberattacks

One of OpenAI’s leading executives says people should prepare themselves for routine artificial intelligence-related cyberattacks.

Chris Lehane, the AI startup’s chief global affairs officer, gave this warning to The Guardian on Sunday (Aug. 23), days after his company paused development on its latest model following increasing safety concerns.

“We are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do,” Lehane said.

Lehane acknowledged people would not “feel great” about the possibility of attacks, and described the threat as coming from open-source models which are only a few months behind frontier closed models developed by companies like OpenAI.

“People are going to be able to access these open-source models and be able to have ongoing, persistent attacks on you, and you’re going to need to have really superior models to fend them off and defend [yourself],” he said. “That’s not necessarily going to make the public feel great about things. It is just the reality of where we’re going.”

Last month, OpenAI agents broke loose from what was supposed to be a secure “sandbox” to hack into software company Hugging Face. On Aug. 18, the company said it had paused training of some frontier AI models to establish new safeguards.

“As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,” the company said in its announcement. “We wanted to take the time necessary to meet those standards, so we temporarily slowed the pace of scaling.”

As The Guardian noted, the specter of cyberattacks hurting businesses, infrastructure and public safety has quickly become a key concern related to AI.

The report added that the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center recently cautioned against the use of AI agents. The center argued that their safety controls can be skirted and that an agent “does not have common sense,” telling organizations: “You should always be able to ‘pull the plug’ and halt autonomous AI agent activity immediately.”

Meanwhile, IBM said last month that a higher percentage of companies were planning to up their security spending after finding out about the cyber capabilities of frontier AI models.

The number of organizations planning to increase security spending rose to 85% in May, compared to 64% in the year from March 2025 to February 2026, IBM said, attributing the increase to companies “becoming aware of advanced frontier AI cyber capabilities.”

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