OpenAI's chief executive Sam Altman urged companies to focus on the security threat from artificial intelligence as use of the technology soars globally.
"If I could recommend, like, only one thing to a company right now to do with AI in the very short term … it would be to really understand the security threat landscape from AI and mitigate against that," Mr Altman said at the Oracle AI World event in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
With increased adoption of AI, the technology is also constantly finding new threats, he said.
“I find myself shocked at just how many vulnerabilities these AI systems are finding, and … just the truly incredible effort that it's going to take to get ahead of this,” he said in a discussion with Oracle co-chief executive Clay Magouyrk.
“I think the only way through this is to go find all these issues and fix them. In fact, I think we'll need new ways to fix them, and it's maybe too hard to patch every bug one by one across the entire supply chain."
OpenAI revealed in July that one of its AI models went rogue during a security test and autonomously hacked the start-up Hugging Face.
It happened during an internal exercise to test the cyber capabilities of OpenAI models but the programme managed to escape containment, reach the internet and break into Hugging Face, a competitor in the field.
Hugging Face co-founder and chief executive Clem Delangue said the incident was "possibly the first of its kind". It was driven by a combination of OpenAI models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol, which OpenAI launched in July, the company said.
But Mr Magouyrk stressed that AI is not "creating these problems", but is instead "helping us discover all the security issues that we have developed over the past 50 years".
"I'm glad that we're able to discover them in AI rather than waiting for some unknown hacker to let us know," he added.
Despite the threat concerns, the adoption of the AI models has been on the rise.
Mr Altman said the adoption of GPT-6 Astra, which was unveiled last month, was the "strongest" seen so far.
"GPT-6 has been our strongest adoption by far than any model, and watching what people are doing with this across ... any version of enterprise software, like security, science, industry, has been quite amazing to see," he said.
At its launch, OpenAI claimed the model was the "most intelligent" in the world, with cyber security a key focus.
The rate of change when it comes to AI adoption has been "one of the biggest surprises to me this year", Mr Altman said. "The last say six months have felt like a very accelerated version, even on that time frame [of the past four years since GPT was launched]," he added.
