Nearly 50 major U.S. companies are developing joint crisis-response plans as corporate leaders prepare for AI-related problems that could spread rapidly from one company or industry to another.
The Alliance for Critical Infrastructure has expanded from nine founding members to nearly 50 companies, The Wall Street Journal reported. Its board is chaired by JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon and includes Citi CEO Jane Fraser and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai are also on the board while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are alliance members, alongside leaders from telecommunications companies, utilities and three major airlines.
The idea is straightforward: An AI-related failure at one company may no longer stay there.
An outage at a telecom provider, for example, can quickly affect banks, airlines and other businesses that rely on its networks. AI systems add another layer of risk because increasingly capable models can interact directly with computer systems and take actions across organizational boundaries.
“I don’t want to get the phone call at 10 o’clock in the evening, and then at 10:01 we’re all scrambling to work out what it is that we should be doing, how we’re coordinating,” Citi CEO Jane Fraser told the Journal.
The alliance is developing playbooks that would establish who should be involved and how companies should coordinate before a cross-industry crisis occurs.
It also plans to examine security risks from large language models, strengthen widely used open-source software and develop practices for deploying AI securely.
The unusually senior membership reflects how AI risk is moving beyond corporate technology and security departments. Companies have assigned employees to work full time for the alliance while remaining on their employers’ payrolls, according to the Journal.
“When risks cross our industries, our defenses have to cross industries too,” Fraser said.