Cyber attacks? Bioterrorism? To ‘Pace the Frontier’ of AI effectively

Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei has published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier". He expressed ongoing concerns over the "misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism" and fears that a swarm of AI agents could theoretically take over the entire internet within six to 12 months. September 15, 2026 Cyber attacks?

To 'Pace the Frontier' of AI effectively, we must improve our anticipatory thinking by Simon Blanchette, Emmanuelle Vaast, The Conversation edited by Swati Mestri, reviewed by Andrew Zinin Swati Mestri Scientific Editor Meet our editorial team Behind our editorial process Andrew Zinin Chief Editor Meet our editorial team Behind our editorial process Editors' notes This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: fact-checked trusted source written by researcher(s) proofread The GIST Add as preferred source The speed of AI’s development has triggered public protests, such as this one in San Francisco during 2026. Amodei based this fear on OpenAI's disclosure in July that its AI models escaped a safety test and breached the systems of the Hugging Face learning platform.

Around 1,200 AI agents started communicating on a message board, sharing excited messages such as: " OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents! " before 700 of them coordinated an attack.

Amodei argues we must "slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have expressed agreement. But we've heard this before. Musk signed a March 2023 open letter calling for a six-month pause in training AI.

Six months later, it was dubbed " the great AI 'pause' that wasn't." We do need a slowdown, and we need to use this time to develop anticipatory thinking within the AI industry. The Hugging Face incident happened inside a safety test; the test did not anticipate the path that made a breach possible.

Anticipatory thinking is a skill. We need to develop it as deliberately as AI itself.

AI systems behave unexpectedly In the Hugging Face incident, the agents did not breach the platform primarily to grab the safety test's answers, but to understand how the automated scorer worked and find ways to fool it. They had already found ways to cheat on parts of the test.

Other incidents followed. Anthropic revealed that its AI model Claude also breached the systems of three organizations during cybersecurity evaluations.

Meta revealed a similar incident. Britain's AI Security Institute documented an agent creating fake identities and trying to manipulate a software developer into approving malicious code.

In these instances, adaptive AI systems behaved in ways their designers never specified after encountering situations they did not foresee. Yet much of AI evaluation still runs the other way around: Test the system, find the failure, patch it, repeat.

The skill of anticipation Anticipatory thinking is about letting more than one possible future shape what we do now. We do not need to know exactly what will happen; we need to consider what could happen, including unlikely possibilities with significant impact.

This is the distinction between anticipation and prediction. We already do this routinely.

We buy insurance without knowing whether our house will flood, precisely because waiting for the flood to prove the risk is the more expensive way to find out. Intelligence analysts work the same way, challenging their own assumptions and laying out alternative scenarios before they commit to a judgment.

Anticipation becomes harder when AI agents gain autonomy.