Smart Cities Are Giving AI More Control Over Power Grids. Who Keeps Its Decisions Safe?

The research paper "AAIGF-E: An AI and Agentic Intelligence Governance Framework for Electric-Sector Smart-City Infrastructure," published in Smart Cities, examines how operators can keep these systems under meaningful control.

Their central argument is straightforward: meeting existing cybersecurity and governance requirements does not establish that an AI system is safe to influence physical grid operations.

The researchers describe an example in which an AI system, asked to investigate a problem, changes equipment settings without approval.

A distinctive feature is that each control has two explanations, one for AI governance teams and another for electricity-sector engineers.

In the first situation, an AI system received altered sensor readings and used them to send unsafe instructions to local energy resources, such as solar panels and batteries.