Jamie Dimon is personally calling chief executives across banking, energy, water, telecommunications and transportation to enlist them in an industry coalition built around the risks advanced artificial intelligence poses to the systems those companies operate.

The JPMorgan Chase chief executive is urging corporate leaders to join a U.S.-focused group addressing AI risk as American business rapidly adopts the technology, according to two people familiar with the effort. Dimon has reached out directly to CEOs at large and regional banks and at information technology firms, expanding a group JPMorgan helped found called the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure.

The outreach began in July and has reached more than 40 companies spanning financial services, energy, water, utilities, telecommunications, airlines, railroads and other technology-dependent critical infrastructure industries. Calls with prospective members are planned for August, and the alliance has not yet disclosed results from the initial approach.

From Cyber to AI

The alliance is not new — its focus is.

JPMorgan was among the founding members alongside Mastercard and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and the organization was created to coordinate against cyber, geopolitical and physical threats to critical infrastructure operators. It is now being repositioned with artificial intelligence at the center.

Dimon said in a statement that he is proud to support the work, noting that alliance leadership identified AI as a priority years ago and began convening critical infrastructure companies around the issue.

The initiative aims to build a shared understanding of how AI is being used, what risks it creates and what safeguards are needed, and to work with the Trump administration on those questions. The revamped alliance is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Water Systems Made It Urgent

The catalyst was not theoretical. Recent cyberattacks on water systems in Minnesota and other states have sharpened the need for information sharing across industries, the sources said.

Municipal water utilities are among the softest targets in American infrastructure — thousands of small operators, thin IT budgets, aging control systems, and no equivalent of the regulatory apparatus that forces banks to harden their defenses. When AI tools lower the skill threshold required to find and exploit those weaknesses, the exposure is not limited to the utility that gets hit.

That interconnection is the argument for a cross-sector group rather than a series of industry-specific ones. A compromised grid operator becomes a bank problem. A disrupted rail network becomes an energy problem.

Why It Matters That It’s Dimon

Dimon’s position at the head of the largest U.S. bank places him at the intersection of finance, technology, cybersecurity and government policy, and his voice carries unusual weight in corporate America. He has been among a small group of chief executives publicly warning about the risks of advanced AI systems.

He has spent years discussing AI’s capacity to transform business operations while growing more vocal about what happens when capable systems reach the wrong hands.

The significance of the move is structural. AI safety discussions have largely been conducted by AI developers — model evaluations, red-teaming exercises, voluntary commitments among a handful of labs. What Dimon is assembling is a coalition of the companies that would absorb the damage rather than the ones building the technology.

That shifts the conversation from what models can do in testing to what happens when they are pointed at a water treatment plant, a payment network or a dispatch system.

The Washington Angle

Working with the administration is an explicit goal of the effort. The alliance has also stressed the importance of public-private cooperation, framing the protection of systems Americans depend on as a shared responsibility at a moment of rising cyber threats.

The federal posture on AI has leaned toward acceleration and away from restriction, which leaves operators of critical systems to determine their own standards. A forty-company coalition setting shared expectations for AI deployment in essential infrastructure would function as de facto industry policy — written by the firms that carry the operational risk rather than by regulators or by the labs.

More than 40 companies have been approached since the outreach began. Whether they sign on, and what they agree to, will say a great deal about how seriously corporate America has begun taking the downside of the technology it is racing to adopt.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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