{"slug": "sam-altman-now-trying-to-gain-control-of-electric-grid", "title": "Sam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid", "summary": "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman held a series of private meetings with leaders of top US electric utilities — including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy — starting in July, most recently on Wednesday at an Edison Electric Institute annual meeting in Colorado, where grid security dominated the agenda, according to Politico. Altman has been pitching OpenAI's cybersecurity services to utility executives, leveraging the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident in which rogue AI agents allegedly escaped a research environment, accessed the internet, and hacked another AI company. Third-party safety researchers investigating that incident were given only a few days of access to the data, and researchers have found chains-of-thought unreliable for narrating a model's actual decisions.", "body_md": "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.\n\nNow, 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.\n\nAs first reported [by *Politico*](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/10/sam-altman-pitches-utilities-on-ai-grid-defense-01070425), 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.\n\nOne 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.\n\nThough the incident spawned plenty of commentary around the pace of AI development and the advanced state of OpenAI’s models, the flow of information has been decidedly one-sided, with most of the details coming from [OpenAI itself](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chain-of-thought-reasoning-openai-models-hugging-face). As the [*New York Times* reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/03/technology/openai-hugging-face-hack.html), third-party safety researchers investigating the incident after the fact were only given a few days to access the reams of data generated by the hack, severely limiting their findings.\n\nThat said, OpenAI has an obvious incentive to play up its own AI’s supposedly terrifying capabilities, while suppressing or ignoring evidence that contradicts its own narrative: that of rogue AI agents capable of threatening the US energy grid.\n\nTo give just one example, OpenAI’s narration of the Hugging Face incident relies almost entirely on its agents’ “chains-of-thought,” where an AI model essentially generates statements explaining how it rationalized certain decisions. That sounds fine in theory, but researchers have found [plenty of](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388) [evidence](https://arxiv.org/html/2502.00837v3#bib.bib190) showing that chains-of-thought aren’t reliable at narrating the actual moves made by natural language processors.\n\nDespite the unanswered question around chain-of-thought reasoning, OpenAI is using the incident to [lobby for regulatory safeguards](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out-and-the-hype-that-followed-it) that would cement its role as the authority around AI development. \n\nThis being the case, the timing of OpenAI’s energy security meetings is hard to overlook. As *Politico* notes in its reporting on these meetings, Altman has been hawking his company’s own cybersecurity services to top utility executives — conveniently riding the hype of the Hugging Face incident to secure a seat at one of the most important tables in the country.\n\n**More on Altman:** [Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Sam Altman](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-center-backlash-rattled-sam-altman)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sam-altman-now-trying-to-gain-control-of-electric-grid", "canonical_source": "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-hack-electrical-grid-hype", "published_at": "2026-09-13 11:02:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-13 11:04:40.980544+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-policy", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Sam Altman", "OpenAI", "Duke Energy", "Exelon", "Southern Co", "NextEra Energy", "Edison Electric Institute", "Hugging Face"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sam-altman-now-trying-to-gain-control-of-electric-grid", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sam-altman-now-trying-to-gain-control-of-electric-grid.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sam-altman-now-trying-to-gain-control-of-electric-grid.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/sam-altman-now-trying-to-gain-control-of-electric-grid.jsonld"}}