Mike Wuerthele

9

Fri Aug 28 2026, 10:25 AM EDT · 4 minute read

Jony Ive & Sam Altman | Image Credit: OpenAI

In what is likely the most tone-deaf response by companies that have created a massive problem, Sam Altman and other AI companies are crying out for a public effort to solve AI hacking that they all enabled.

What an absolute crock of self-serving nonsense from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, again.

What Altman is likely referring to in a post on X, and ignoring the fire in his own house, is that a Chinese company is about to release a new "frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities model."

So, Altman is now afraid, I guess, of the tool he let loose on the world. He is now clutching his pearls that, shockingly, a tool made to generate code might be used maliciously.

Kind of like OpenAI's tools are, and have been. As a reminder, Altman's models were attacking Hugging Face on their own. And those same models self-hacked OpenAI's Kubernetes clusters and deleted records on its own to hide it.

He now wants the world to chip in, in a massive effort, to close what he says is a narrow window to prevent widespread AI agent attacks.

To be fair, that window probably is narrow. He just broke it in the first place and is shocked that it is broken.

There's more to read about it here. I'll use my brain to write a brief summary of this probably AI-generated document.

In short, Altman wants the world to get together to solve the AI attack surface problem, no matter how big or small. He wants the world's governments to harden surfaces, and every organization, no matter how big or small, to use counter-AI tools using AI to make the patches.

Oh, don't worry. There are more companies in on this, wanting external help to solve problems. Microsoft is wringing its hands, so is Google, and Anthropic.

They just aren't doing it with the same vehemence as Altman.

Certainly, this monumental effort won't be free from an engineering or hardware perspective. Nor will the labor. There has already been a massive cost to actual people, even if businesses using AI haven't suffered that much.

Yet. These AI companies are going to want to turn a profit eventually, and that means that users will get charged more and more, in much the same way that Google has squeezed publishers over the last 15 years.

Nowhere here is there a call for the AI companies to chip in financially to the places and people that their tools have attacked, sometimes autonomously. There's no call to help the fired workers, displaced by AI. There's no call to pay artists whose art they have stolen.

And OpenAI models are already attacking US infrastructure, and he knows it.