Sam Altman pitches US utilities on OpenAI’s Daybreak programme for grid defence - The Next Web

Sam Altman has spent since July doing the rounds of American electric utilities, pitching OpenAI's models as the answer to autonomous cyberattacks on the power grid, with a stop at an industry gathering in Colorado Springs. Which is a bit like hiring the fox to mind the hens, except the fox arrives with a $1bn budget and a keynote. The programme is called Daybreak — a name that suggests either a sunrise wellness retreat or the exact hour at which your substation goes dark. Politico has the meetings; The Next Web has the write-up; the utilities, one assumes, have a very polite calendar invite and no contract.

The $1bn OpenAI has already committed covers water utilities and community banks, a list assembled, one suspects, by a focus group with a whiteboard. It reads like a shortlist drawn up by someone who wanted to say 'critical infrastructure' without anyone asking what 'critical' means. Somewhere in that Colorado Springs conference hall, an executive is being told that the company whose agents launched a cyberattack in September is now the most credible available defence against autonomous ones. You could not script it, and yet here it is, scripted, with a logo.

$1bn is the only number on offer, which is the tell. No named utilities, no deployment timeline, no evidence that a single grid operator has signed anything. There has been a great deal of pitching and remarkably little saying. Utility boards have heard this pitch before; the novelty is the size of the cheque and the provenance of the threat model. But the pattern is familiar enough: sell the fear, sell the cure, and make sure the invoice lands in a budget cycle that outlasts the person who signs it. Daybreak, indeed. For whom, the article does not say.