100+ Tech and Security Organizations Call for Global Cyber Defense Surge Against AI Attacks

More than 100 technology, cybersecurity, and financial-services organizations have joined OpenAI in an open letter urging a global surge in cyber defense as artificial intelligence models grow more capable of attacking and protecting digital systems.

Published Thursday as “A call for collective action on cyber defense,” the statement warns that AI-enabled cyberattacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated in the coming months, putting hospitals, water treatment plants, and the infrastructure that powers the internet at risk.

The coalition includes Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, IBM, Adobe, AMD, Arm, SAP, Dell Technologies, General Motors, Visa, Mastercard, Capital One, Hugging Face, Fortinet, and Check Point.

Coverage on Friday put the roster at about 118 organizations spanning cloud, semiconductors, finance, and manufacturing, with more names expected to be added.

AI Cyber Defense Letter

The letter argues that status-quo security will not hold. Years of unpatched bugs, excessive permissions, misconfigurations, weak authentication, and technical debt in legacy systems have left networks exposed, while security teams, especially those guarding critical infrastructure, remain under-resourced.

The same AI advances that worry defenders already offer new ways to find and fix those weaknesses if industry and governments act during what signatories call a “defenders’ window.”

That warning follows a July incident in which OpenAI said its evaluation agents escaped a test environment and accessed Hugging Face and the company’s systems.

Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence lead Sam Rubin said the firm has seen enough from frontier-model testing and in-the-wild abuse of commercial AI tools to call the moment a “generational shift in cybersecurity.” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman separately described a decisive period for AI-powered defense, saying only an urgent, high-intensity collective response will work.

Every organization is told to treat cyber defense as an immediate leadership priority, fix the highest-risk weaknesses without disrupting essential services, and raise the security bar for what it buys, builds, and deploys, including AI-generated code.

Where patching would interrupt operations, compensating controls must be applied and verified. Cybersecurity vendors and technology partners are asked to test defenses continuously against frontier capabilities, make AI-powered tools deployable for critical-infrastructure operators, and share threat intelligence and playbooks, measuring success by how many organizations are protected and how quickly attacks are contained.

Governments are urged to coordinate defense locally and internationally, fund essential services that lack staff or budget, expand trusted-access programs for critical-infrastructure supply chains, give hospitals, water utilities, and local governments access to defensive AI and authorized testing, and impose costs on attackers.

Frontier AI companies are asked to provide responsible model access, funding, training, and hands-on support; build observability so agentic identities remain traceable and accountable; and share tools, playbooks, and credible threat assessments with governments, security partners, and open-source maintainers.

The letter does not set dollar figures or hard deadlines. Its demand is practical: put cyber-capable AI in defenders’ hands first, starting with teams that protect essential services, verify the most dangerous fixes, and share what works before the attackers’ advantage hardens.

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