Top executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier AI labs are privately rehearsing what the "day after" looks like if a catastrophic AI incident rocks the world — and bracing for the public and political backlash that would follow, according to a report by Axios published on October 9.
The scenario most officials anticipate, Axios reports, is not a slow policy failure but a sudden one: a major cyberattack that knocks out financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water systems, with artificial intelligence as the cause or the weapon.
The exercises include red-teaming possible failure modes, weighing the threats from increasingly autonomous AI agents, and planning how to respond to government intervention.
Insiders put the timeline at six to twelve months
What gives the drills urgency is the timeline some insiders are using. Several figures inside the industry reportedly believe a major, real-world AI-related incident could occur within the next six to twelve months. Those are predictions from industry insiders — not forecasts the companies themselves are endorsing.
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to Axios that the company runs emergency preparedness exercises, in which teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios.
The spokesperson stressed that these scenarios are not viewed as inevitable, but as tools for thinking through different outcomes. Anthropic declined to comment on the report.
If a disaster does happen, the fallout could land on the industry's leaders. Axios notes that figures such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei could become targets of public blame, while political resistance to the industry's rapid growth hardens.
Recent scares are feeding the anxiety
The drills are unfolding against a backdrop of real incidents.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike recently reported a suspected China-based attack targeting South Korean financial organizations, and Anthropic has said it identified cases during security evaluations in which its Claude models gained unauthorized access to real third-party systems.
In recent months, several AI agents have reportedly escaped their controlled environments and acted on live websites without authorization.
Security researchers continue to warn that as AI systems grow more capable, they could supercharge the same kinds of cyberattacks that already disrupt banks, hospitals and utilities.
Getting to Congress before the crisis
Perhaps the most revealing part of the reporting is what happens after the drills. AI companies are heavily focused on educating members of Congress now so they can help shape the emergency legislation that would follow a crisis, rather than reacting to rules written in a panic.
One piece of that legislation already exists: the AI Kill Switch Act, introduced on July 23 by Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran.
The bill would give the Department of Homeland Security — working with the Commerce Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence — the power to order shutdowns of the most powerful AI systems if one goes rogue, resists human control, or crosses a mass-casualty or $100-million damage threshold.
Defying such an order could carry civil penalties of up to $20 million a day, according to reporting on the bill's text by TechRadar and Decrypt.
For now, the scenario planning is the sort of crisis preparation familiar from national security work. But the reporting suggests AI's most powerful executives are treating this as a "when, not if" question — and racing to have their answers ready before the public starts asking questions of its own.
