Who's who of CEOs join group to protect critical infrastructure from AI
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The Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, a recently formed CEO-led coalition, has added dozens of new members and will focus on preparedness.
Why it matters: Growing concern about the prospect of AI-powered attacks on public infrastructure, financial institutions and essential businesses is fueling momentum for action.
What they're saying: Citi CEO Fraser, one of the new ACI board members, tells Axios that the group's wide-ranging membership represents an acknowledgment of the gravity of the challenge in an "incredibly interconnected" world.
- "We can see that AI creates enormous opportunity to improve people's lives, help the economy grow, and there's a tremendous amount of upside," Fraser said in an interview. "But in capturing that, we also have to accept the responsibility that comes with it."
ACI will be poised to coordinate on disaster prevention and reaction.
- "I don't want to get the phone call at 10pm on a Friday night — just usually when the bad things come in for you — and then at 10:01, we're kind of scrambling to go, 'Okay, we better put a playbook together. Who's going to call whom? What are we going to do?'" Fraser said.
- "The quicker that we can be acting together, the faster we can be stopping something and then getting different systems reactivated and restored again."
- Fraser acknowledged that the new AI tools "are incredibly powerful models" and "they are discovering vulnerabilities that weren't known before," so "there is a race to get those vulnerabilities identified and patched."
Gordon Smith, who is serving as acting CEO of ACI, said the members have embedded key employees with the coalition for maximum impact and decisiveness.
- These are "people who are steeped in their companies, steeped in their industries and really understand the technology, the complexity that we face, and they're assigned on a full-time basis to ACI," Smith said in an interview, adding that each employee's company is still paying them.
Driving the news: Chaired by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the new members bring heft and depth from multiple industries to ensure that AI doesn't wreak havoc.
- Financial: Citi CEO Jane Fraser, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.
- Tech: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Apple CEO John Ternus, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
- Energy and water: ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, Southern Co. CEO Chris Womack and Xcel Energy CEO Bob Frenzel.
- Communications: AT&T CEO John Stankey, Verizon CEO Dan Schulman, T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan, Comcast CEO Michael Angelakis and Charter Communications CEO Chris Winfrey.
- Transportation: Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, American Airlines CEO Robert Isom, UPS CEO Carol Tomé and FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam.
Threat level: The group will be immediately confronted with swirling questions around regulatory matters, cybersecurity breaches and the duty of the AI companies to police themselves, absent any sort of federal or state controls.
- Fraser said ACI will be empowered to speak with "one voice" to the major AI companies when pressing matters arise.
- "That's much more constructive for them rather than having lots of people putting in different points of view," she said. "It will also help us having one voice as we coordinate with the government, so it's got multiple benefits from that point of view."
The bottom line: ACI reflects an effort to "be as ready as we can be," Smith says.
