OpenAI’s $100B severe-harm bar is higher than major U.S. blackout losses
ohlennart · x · 2026-08-04
The post argues that OpenAI’s $100B severe-harm threshold is extraordinarily high.
- The attached chart compares blackout scope and duration against economic damage.
- It notes that reaching $100B in harm would require an outage on the scale of 100 million people affected for about a week, or an equivalent combination of scope and duration.
- The author also says the blackout-only damages from Hurricane Sandy (2012), the Texas power crisis (2021), and the 2003 Northeast blackout together are already more than half of that threshold; when counting the full storm losses, the combined figure is about $130B.
Overall, the point is that OpenAI’s severe-harm bar is not just high, but far above most real-world catastrophe benchmarks people might casually compare it with.
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