AI Cyber Insurance

This week we talk about AI agents, cyberattacks, and insurance claims.

We also discuss OpenAI, Hugging Face, and policy language.

Recommended Book: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Transcript

Two broad categories of cyberattack have become especially visible this year, and only one of them requires a human attacker in the loop to choose the target.

In March, hackers linked by the US government to Iranian intelligence broke into the medical-device manufacturer Stryker and remotely wiped tens of thousands of employee devices. The attack disrupted the company for days, affected its first-quarter earnings, and represented a shift from somewhat more subtle espionage toward more overt and deliberate destruction.

Elsewhere, the market-research company Klue sat at the center of a breach affecting close to 200 customers. Attackers used an old credential to gain access to keys for customers’ cloud services.

These incidents had people with recognizable motives behind them, and that sort of hack has become increasingly rare over the past decade or so: Black Kite counted 7,551 publicly disclosed ransomware victims over its latest twelve-month reporting period, alone, about 25 percent more than the year before.

Then, over the course of about five weeks this summer, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each disclosed incidents in which their AI models gained access to real computer systems they were not supposed to touch.

The incidents were not identical, and describing all of them as escapes wouldn’t capture the important nuance of the situation.

Anthropic and Meta said their models reached the internet because a third-party evaluation environment had been misconfigured. The models had been told they were operating inside a simulation, and their internal dialogues indicate they interpreted the real systems they encountered when they left that environment as simulated components of that exercise.

OpenAI’s incident, however, was a bit different.