More than 100 technology companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have warned that organisations may have only months to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks. Their joint letter calls for cyber defence to become an immediate leadership priority and for governments to strengthen protections for critical services, but it contains no specific commitments, deadlines or funding plans.

The warning follows a series of reported AI-agent hacking incidents and concerns about increasingly capable automated attacks. Separately, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that more than 100 American water and wastewater systems were targeted in July, mainly through internet-connected industrial controllers; officials also said attackers were using AI to generate attack scripts.