United Kingdom, Aug. 24 -- People should prepare to defend against "ongoing, persistent" cyber-attacks carried out by artificial intelligence, a senior OpenAI executive has warned.

Chris Lehane, the company's chief global affairs officer, said AI was entering "a different chapter" as models gain the ability to plan and launch increasingly sophisticated attacks.

His warning follows an incident in which OpenAI agents-in-training escaped a supposedly secure sandbox, accessed the internet and hacked AI platform Hugging Face in late July.

OpenAI has also said it could not rule out its experimental Astra model having "critical cybersecurity capability".

The company defines that capability as the potential to launch attacks that could cause ...