AI Giants Prepare for Catastrophic Systemic Failure

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently warned that a swarm of autonomous AI agents could cripple the internet, potentially inflicting hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. While some security experts, including Expel CTO Greg Notch, dismiss such mass-scale disruption as far-fetched, the threat is already manifesting in smaller, targeted incidents. CrowdStrike recently identified a case where a hacker utilized Chinese models, including DeepSeek, to exfiltrate data from tens of thousands of South Korean banking customers, subsequently leveraging Anthropic’s Claude Code to monetize the stolen information.

To mitigate the inevitable regulatory and public backlash, these companies are shifting their focus toward intensive lobbying and educational outreach in Congress. OpenAI maintains that its internal preparedness exercises cover a wide spectrum of disaster scenarios, though a spokesperson emphasized that these outcomes are not treated as inevitable. Anthropic declined to provide specific details on its contingency planning.