Rapid rollout into cyber-physical systems raises outage risk, Gartner warns

The next blackout to plunge a G20 nation into chaos might not come courtesy of cybercriminals or bad weather, but from an AI system tripping over its own shoelaces.

Analyst firm Gartner warned this week that misconfigured artificial intelligence embedded in national infrastructure could shut down critical services in a major economy as soon as 2028, delivering the kind of disruption usually blamed on hostile governments or catastrophic natural events. The prediction centers on the rapid adoption of AI in cyber-physical systems, which Gartner defines as "systems that orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking, and analytics to interact with the physical world (including humans)."

Gartner's warning isn't really about attackers taking over AI tools – it's about what happens when everything is working as intended... until it isn't. More operators are allowing machine learning systems to make real-time decisions, and those systems can respond unpredictably if a setting ...