LONDON — Britain’s spies will have a leading role in Britain’s preparation for AI threats, the head of MI5 announced on Tuesday, after warning the technology could enable terrorists to access bioweapons. Ken McCallum, director general of the U.K.'s intelligence agency has established the AI Threat Assessment Centre to help determine how the government views potential threats. Giving his annual threat update from MI5 headquarters in London, McCallum said: “Human history has given us no experience of facing an actor which is smarter than we are, is capable of outthinking us.” He stressed the “real” risks of AI, saying MI5 has caught terrorists seeking to use AI to “improve their reconnaissance and attack methodologies,” in addition to the danger of AI-enabled drones.
Though it has not yet been “realized,” he said he attaches “the greatest weight” to AI’s potential to “change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons.” He said “low-capability” terrorists may get a “capability” uplift if the safety guardrails in AI models don't work as intended. He added that for a long time “many terrorists would dearly love” access to chemical, biological or radiological weapons, but that it has been hard for them to achieve. One thing that “does trouble me”, McCallum said, is the pace at which the world is evolving.
He noted that the "weird bits inside MI5” that focus on how Britain's adversaries will act in five years from now are seeing those timelines shortening due to AI. He said it is now his responsibility to “drag my organization forwards at a faster pace than human beings generally want to be dragged.” The new threat assessment centre, known as AITAC, will bring together expertise from bodies including Britain’s AI Security Institute, National Crime Agency, and the National Cyber Security Centre to “separate the bluster from the realities” of AI's threat to the British public. This is the third center of its kind MI5 has set up, after creating similar units dedicated to analyzing terrorism and state threats.
Asked how the agency would work, McCallum said it would look at emerging trends and how the U.K. can best think about and prioritize the various manifestations of AI threats. Though the government, rather than AITAC, will decide the response to AI, McCallum said it was partly set up to avoid “competitive analysis, slightly conflicting and confusing messages that otherwise might exist, where you have different departments offering their own opinion” on the issue. He said that it would enable everyone to have “a single version of the truth, a single understanding, a single lexicon, typography.” McCallum also said MI5 will now give national resilience — such as protecting critical infrastructure, countering cognitive warfare, and addressing technology threats — “front-rank mission status” alongside its twin roles of countering state threats and terrorism.
He noted that MI5 is now devoting more resources to countering state threats than it was during the Cold War, noting an uptick in anti-immigration cases tipping into terrorist intent, while Iran has shifted its ambitions to hit harder targets such as military sites.
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