(Sept 21): Citigroup Inc chief executive officer Jane Fraser said that companies are racing to build up their defences as artificial-intelligence models become even more powerful and risk spurring cyber attacks.

“There is a race to defend and shore up all of the firm’s perimeters and there is a tsunami of patching going on in the world at the moment in all companies,” Fraser said Sunday at the Qatar Economic Forum held in New York.

Earlier this year, Anthropic PBC released its Mythos model, a system that the company warned had the power to usher in a new era of cyber risk. When Mythos came out, “that was not a good day,” Fraser said about the AI evolution.

With the release of that model, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and then-Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell summoned Wall Street leaders to a meeting about the model, urging executives at the huddle to prepare their systems for the more powerful AI models.

Since then, AI from firms including Google and Anthropic has inadvertently hacked into companies. That’s spurred warnings from executives including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei that companies need to slow the pace of AI development and that his firm would implement new safety steps such as third-party evaluators.

Earlier this month, Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who resigned from his role, spurred some unease about the risks of AI, warning that researchers believe that the technology could kill people by the end of the decade. Industry executives such as Nvidia Corp’s Jensen Huang fired back, saying that the technology doesn’t pose an extinction risk to humanity.

“I think we all need to take a deep breath, slow down,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc CEO David Solomon said Sunday at the Qatar Economic Forum. He added that he was “highly confident humanity will be here and that we’ll all be participating actively.”

As for the development of the technology, the logjam has moved from chips to the energy needed to power AI, according to Citigroup’s Fraser.

“The bottleneck has moved from chips into energy,” she said. “And we’re seeing enormous demand for energy around the world.”

Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, said Sunday that the country is working with AI companies to invest responsibly, and that safeguards around the technology are still a work in progress.

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