In recent weeks, supermarket refrigeration across Europe has been turned against the food it protects. After an earlier wave in France that hit hundreds of supermarkets, a second attack on 2 November struck stores in Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and Estonia. One Swedish store reported its freezers set to 50°C and discarded the stock. The same day, a cyberattack on a refrigeration supplier raised temperature and defrost thresholds to extremely high levels at three French blood-service sites storing plasma. The blood service says no plasma was lost. It also says it was not the direct target.

So far, no public evidence links these attacks to artificial intelligence. They appear to have exploited ordinary weaknesses. That makes them more alarming, not less. If familiar flaws can already do this, what happens when AI makes finding and exploiting them faster, cheaper and more widely available? The International AI Safety Report 2026 already finds that criminals actively use general-purpose AI in cyberattacks, including to discover software vulnerabilities.

That question is now being asked by the scientists who built the field. On 3 November, Geoffrey Hinton told the Guardian that a large-scale incident, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems, could come this year or next. He described a scenario in which the financial system is offline for a week and likened such an event to the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, a warning that might change behaviour only after the damage. [Verify the comparison in the Guardian original.]

Hinton’s timeline is a prediction, not a certainty. Critics such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang have dismissed his forecasts as........

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