Before recent high-profile hacks raised the specter of AI possibly “ killing all humans ,” our energy systems were already disturbingly vulnerable to cyberattack — and the risk is growing. We were just kind of surviving at the appetite of our predators,” Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety and resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), told me last year .
What happened
This is still a developing thread, so the useful part is knowing which source signals are hardening and which ones still need caution. In security, the real value is whether the team becomes measurably safer, not whether another settings screen has been added.
Where the sources line up
“We were always prey. We were just kind of surviving at the appetite of our predators,” Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety and resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), told me last year . At the time, I was preoccupied with a Department of Homeland Security warning that Iranian actors and sympathizers could target the US with cyberattacks.
Practical impact for readers
Last week, I called Corman up to chat about recent incidents of rogue AI agents orchestrating their own complex cyberattacks . Even AI executives are talking about whether the technology they’re building could grow so out of control that it triggers an apocalypse. If there is now a 10 percent chance of artificial intelligence one day killing all humans, as some AI developers warn , surely there’s a chance it could knock our lights out in the meantime?
Who should pay attention now
But when I spoke to Corman and other cybersecurity experts, they were still more worried about generative AI in the hands of bad actors than they were about rogue agents. As tech companies race to build ever more powerful AI models, utilities will similarly have to shore up their defenses — no matter who or what initiated the attack. The next step is to see whether the current signals harden into a durable change or fade as a short-lived experiment. That is why the useful reading move is not to stop at the headline, but to compare the promise, the workflow change, and the likely cost before deciding anything.
What is still unclear
Much of our critical energy infrastructure — keeping the lights on in our homes, food cold in our refrigerators, and life-saving devices working in hospitals — was never designed to connect to the internet. The lifespan of a power plant is typically decades long. The average age of a nuclear reactor in the US is about 44 years . They weren’t constructed with today’s cybersecurity risks in mind, making them easy targets for hackers.
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