Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.
Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.
As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.
One of the most recent discussions took place on Wednesday in Colorado, during an annual meeting hosted by the Edison Electric Institute. Dominating the agenda, Politico notes, were discussions on electrical grid security, evidently spurred by the OpenAI-Hugging Face debacle, in which rogue AI agents allegedly broke free of their research environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another AI company.
