Axios: Anthropic and OpenAI Executives Are Privately War-Gaming an AI Catastrophe

Executives at leading AI labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, are privately running through a scenario in which an AI-caused catastrophic event takes place. They are trying to work out how the public and politicians would react, and what a company should be doing at that moment. Axios reported this in an exclusive. The outlet describes the exercise as preparation for "the day after," meaning the day after an incident. The Chinese outlet Jiqizhixin put the timeframe "within a year" in its headline. That is its interpretation: the fragment of the original available to us contains no such forecast, and we do not have the full Axios text.

What exactly they are rehearsing

The framing matters. This is not about how to prevent an incident: that is the job of technical policies such as Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy and OpenAI's Preparedness Framework. The executives are rehearsing the next stage: the event has already happened, public opinion is shifting, and hearings are being scheduled and bills drafted in Washington and other capitals. The question is what the companies will say, what they will shut down and whom they will call in the first hours.

Other industries know such drills well. Airlines, banks and pharmaceutical companies have long rehearsed crisis communications. For the AI industry this is a new practice, and its emergence suggests that inside the companies the scenario is considered real enough to spend executive time on.

What is known so far

• Source: an Axios exclusive, retold by Jiqizhixin.
• Participants: executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies; the full list is not disclosed in the fragment available to us.
• Format: closed, private simulation of the aftermath, not a public initiative.
• Subject: the reaction of the public and politicians, and the companies' response.
• Unknown: the specific type of catastrophe, the criteria for a "catastrophic" event, and whether the companies share a common protocol.
• The "within a year" timeframe: taken from the Jiqizhixin headline; we have not seen it confirmed in the Axios text.

Why this matters for the market

The industry-wide reaction to a major incident is almost always harsher than regulation in calm times. If an AI system turns out to be involved in real harm, the spotlight will fall not only on the company at fault but on all developers of frontier models. The risk is shared: restrictions could hit everyone at once.

That is why it is worth asking how closely the rehearsals are coordinated among competitors. If the labs agree on common procedures for disclosing information and shutting down systems, regulators will have a ready-made model to work from. If each goes its own way, the companies risk publicly contradicting one another in the first days of a crisis. There is not yet enough data to draw a conclusion.

What teams building on these models should do

For companies that depend on the APIs of major labs, this news is worth reading as a signal of supply-chain risk. Three things are enough to do today:

• check whether you can quickly switch to another provider or a local model if access to your primary one is restricted;
• list which of your processes would stop if an AI service became unavailable, and test the manual fallback;
• prepare your own communication plan for an incident involving your AI-based product.

The labs themselves will also face questions: which scenarios they are considering and how ready they are to discuss them publicly. The details in the original Axios piece will clarify how seriously this preparation has been worked out.