Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out how the public and Washington would turn on the industry after a catastrophic AI event, Axios reported on Friday. The event they anticipate is most likely a large-scale cyberattack that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.
“OpenAI conducts preparedness exercises where teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios,” a company spokesperson told Axios. “These scenarios are not treated as inevitable, but are meant to help us prepare for a variety of circumstances.” Anthropic declined to comment. Scenario planning is routine in business and national security, Axios noted, but many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable, and many industry insiders said they expect one in the next six to 12 months.
According to Axios, the planners expect the first case of significant real-world harm from unsafe AI to turn an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as President Trump for his reluctance to regulate it. Voters were already uneasy: in a Reuters/Ipsos poll this week, 57% said Trump isn’t taking AI risks seriously. Axios pointed to the recent campaign against South Korean financial organizations, where a hacker from China allegedly used AI tools including DeepSeek to steal data from tens of thousands of bank customers and used Claude Code to ask where to sell it, according to CrowdStrike. South Korea’s president has said AI appears to have been used in the bank hacks.
The planning involves red-teaming worst-case scenarios and focuses mainly on educating members of Congress, Axios reported. Executives know new regulation has no chance of passing right now, but they want to shape the laws and policies leaders will reach for after a first catastrophic event. They assume Democrats, ascendant after the midterms, would move fast to shut AI down but would struggle with an aging Congress, an economy now intertwined with the AI buildout and open-weight models that can already be downloaded freely.
The most heavy-handed Democratic proposals include banning superintelligence or pausing advanced AI development, Axios reported. Others have bipartisan support and some industry buy-in, including a required kill switch on advanced AI, though experts question whether all AI systems could actually be turned off. Bill Gates argued last month that a kill switch is not enough and that safeguards must be required by law.