Industry that built the problem offers to sell you the solution

OpenAI has gathered more than 100 of the world's biggest tech and infosec companies to warn that cyber defense is in trouble - a reassuring development given quite a few of them helped build the technology involved.

The open letter has more than 100 names attached to it, including many of the companies with the most to gain – or lose – from what happens next.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft are among the AI builders warning about increasingly capable AI attacks, while security heavyweights including Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks have also signed on.

AWS, IBM, Oracle and Cisco are there too, alongside banks, consultancies and other companies whose businesses depend on keeping an increasingly messy technology stack running.

Together, they have reached a troubling conclusion: the current approach to cybersecurity isn't working.

"We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses," the letter warns, predicting that AI-enabled attacks will become "far more widespread and sophisticated" in the coming months as models become more capable.

Hospitals, water treatment plants and internet infrastructure are singled out as being at risk.

It's an interesting warning given who's making it.

Some of the signatories are racing to build ever more capable AI systems, while others make billions selling the cloud services, enterprise software and security tools that are supposed to keep attackers at bay.

Still, the underlying problem is real enough.

The letter points to old vulnerabilities, unpatched software, misconfigurations and weak authentication as problems that have been piling up for years, particularly across critical infrastructure where security teams are often short on money and staff.

Their proposed solution is, inevitably, more AI.

The letter calls for cyber-capable models to be put into the hands of more defenders, with cheaper models handling security work at scale and frontier systems reserved for harder problems.

Security vendors should continuously test their defenses against frontier AI capabilities, share threat intelligence and help critical infrastructure operators deploy AI-powered defenses.