World-shaking cyberattack could hit in 2026, Sam Altman issues dire warning

In the rapidly evolving age of artificial intelligence, cyber threats are becoming more pronounced and dangerous.

What’s more scary is that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman issued a chilling warning of an upcoming “world-shaking” cyberattack.

In a recent interview with Axios, Sam Altman talked about how highly advanced AI models are capable enough to alter the landscapes of cybersecurity and biosecurity.

The Axios co-founder asked him directly if a catastrophic cyber event was realistic in the next 12 months. Altman answered, "I think that's totally possible. Yes."

According to Altman, AI models are becoming highly advanced. At this level of advancement, they pose significant risks to cybersecurity. If we talk about next-generation AI modes, they will be more threatening than ever and once those capabilities leak into open source, the game will change permanently.

“I suspect in the next year, we will see significant threats we have to mitigate from cyber as these models are capable and will get more capable in the near future,” Altman added.

The CEO of ChatGPT maker company also shed light on the growing threat of biosecurity. He said the models are getting extremely good at advanced biology and wonderful things will happen, like curing diseases that have killed people for centuries.

“But, someone is going to try to misuse those,” he warned. “The need for society to be resilient to terrorist groups using these models to try to create novel pathogens is no longer a theoretical thing, or it's not going to be for much longer.”

According to Altman, the solution does not lie in prevention; it is rooted in resilience. The companies can also mitigate these dangers by aligning the models and having good classifiers and good safety protocols.