AI Executives Are Privately Preparing for a Public Revolt After a Catastrophic AI Event

Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event — and they are planning as if one is coming in 2027.

The internal exercises focus on what some executives call "the day after": the political, regulatory, and public response following the first major real-world disaster linked to advanced AI. These officials anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water.

Some industry insiders believe a serious incident could happen within the next six to 12 months — and that many top AI researchers and executives view a major incident as effectively inevitable. OpenAI confirmed it conducts emergency preparedness drills to help teams simulate a range of potential scenarios, but stressed these scenarios are not viewed as inevitable events. Anthropic declined to comment.

The real drill is the political fallout

The planning is not focused only on containing the technical damage. Companies are also considering how lawmakers and the public could respond after an event that causes widespread disruption. Executives expect such an incident could quickly bring demands for tougher regulation and force policymakers to act under pressure — before the causes and scope of an incident are even fully understood.

That is why the companies are thinking now about how to provide lawmakers with technical information quickly during a crisis. Once a public already skeptical of AI associates the technology with infrastructure collapse, the window for the industry to shape the response closes. Congress is already positioned: the AI Kill Switch Act, introduced July 23 by Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, would give the Department of Homeland Security authority to order shutdowns of the most powerful AI systems when one goes rogue or causes mass-casualty-level harm, with civil penalties up to $20 million a day for defiance.

Washington is already in the room

The political clock is ticking alongside the technical one. On September 29, President Trump hosted executives from Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia, who signed a voluntary agreement on limited AI safety standards that Trump called "morally binding" — with no legal enforcement mechanism behind it. This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Politico that "the world should accept some bad things happening" in exchange for the benefits of AI.

How the options market could play this

A catastrophic AI event that triggers a public and political revolt is a regulatory-tail-risk trade. If the narrative accelerates, the market will price forced restrictions on frontier models — and these names carry the exposure:

• The labs' backers and infrastructure: MSFT, GOOGL, META, and AMZN are the public-market AI leaders that would absorb the first wave of regulatory risk. Watch downside put flow and rising implied volatility skew.
• The picks-and-shovels play: NVDA is the single most crowded AI trade in the market. Any government move to restrict advanced models hits GPU demand expectations — NVDA's options flow would be the first place hedgers show up.
• Defensive rotation: if AI regulation risk bleeds into a broader tech derating, QQQ puts and VIX-linked calls become the market's preferred hedges.

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The AI industry is quietly preparing for 2027. The smart money will hedge before the revolt, not after — sign up for Unusual Whales to see the flow as it happens.