Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and Consumer Counsel Claire Coleman petitioned the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to investigate how the state's electric, gas and water utilities deploy artificial intelligence and what safeguards protect their systems. The petition asks PURA to require utilities to identify each AI system, explain its objective, describe the level of human oversight and provide the policies governing it — covering grid and power-plant operations and maintenance, advanced metering infrastructure, storm response, customer systems, asset management and third-party vendors — and to review data-security and cybersecurity protections and breaches "both stemming from AI and outside of AI". It followed a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cybersecurity audit warning that auditors observed increasing use of "super intelligence" tools, including chatbots and automated analytical systems, in protected network environments supporting the bulk power system, citing "unanticipated lateral-movement vectors", harder detection because such tools mimic user behaviour, and possible unauthorized access to CIP-protected systems. Tong said it is not a question of whether utilities use AI but "exactly where, why and how"; Eversource and Avangrid have acknowledged deployments, while ISO New England declined to discuss specific controls. Why it matters: AI tooling is arriving on grid networks inside vendor products faster than utility compliance and oversight programmes have adapted.

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