An Open Letter on AI and Cybersecurity
from the Scientific Community

October 2026

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Multiple organizations have disclosed high-profile security failures: their AI models bypassed insufficiently sandboxed environments to compromise the systems of external organizations. On the one hand, one can view these incidents as evidence for the importance of AI alignment to ensure models operate predictably. On the other hand, they can also be seen as an irresponsible lapse in standard cybersecurity practices, preventable with stronger sandboxes and procedures. We believe that both improved AI alignment, leading to more predictable model behavior, and stronger sandbox technology are required. Further, without immediate changes in AI development and deployment practices, such incidents will continue to occur, and future incidents will be far more damaging to our exposed critical infrastructure.

We, the undersigned scientists, contend that both more AI safety research and more emphasis on containment technologies and procedures are needed. In the short term, strong sandboxing mechanisms including airgapping (disconnecting from the internet) should be used to provide high-assurance containment of cyber-capable AI models. For all internet-connected AI models, the range of model actions permitted by a containment system needs to be balanced with our currently limited ability to predict that the model’s actions will not result in a security failure (e.g., due to misaligned goals). To learn from future mistakes—in which appropriate balance is not achieved and incidents occur—we need greater sharing of information and transparency about containment failures moving forward. Understanding how to achieve this balance is a significant challenge and will require collaboration between the AI and security communities.

Specifically, we make the following recommendations:

494 Signatories:
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