The head of MI5 has said the domestic intelligence organisation will take inspiration from its work tackling al Qaeda after 9/11 as it faces a new threat from AI.
Sir Ken McCallum set out the ‘new era of national security’ in which the UK finds itself during his annual threat update speech at Thames House.
He said it involves the rising dangers of hostile states – with more MI5 resources devoted to countering those threats than during the Cold War – and more opaque risks from artificial intelligence.
The rapidly evolving tech is ‘already supercharging the cybersecurity contest between attackers and defenders’, McCallum explained.
In his speech, he highlighted the potential for AI to ‘change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons’, which he described as ‘the misuse case to which I’d attach greatest weight’.
The MI5 chief announced the launch of the UK’s AI Threat Assessment Centre, which assembles a ‘team of teams’ from a range of bodies to produce assessments of risks.
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He warned: ‘Put at its simplest, human history has given us no experience of facing an actor which is smarter than we are. Is capable of out-thinking us.
‘This is genuinely novel, and deserves the serious attention it is getting, including in MI5.’
Asked by Metro how the domestic intelligence agency is able to prepare for such a situation, McCallum compared it to the world immediately after the terror attacks on 9/11.
He said: ‘We knew in that moment that there were many thousands of trained jihadis, some of them really quite well-trained, who were prepared to give up their lives to have a proper crack at Western civilisation.
‘And on that day, none of us had the full confident answer to how best to tackle that threat.
‘But tackle it we did, and I’m really proud of the role that MI5 played alongside a whole host of others in bringing al Qaeda down to a more manageable form of threat.’
McCallum continued: ‘With AI, a sort of similar-ish thing applies. I’m not comparing al Qaeda and AI directly.
‘We are working really methodically through the various layers of these challenges.’
He acknowledged there is currently no ‘full and satisfactory solution’ to the question of how the human race engages with the future potential for AI to be ‘misaligned inadvertently with human objectives’.
Elsewhere in his speech, McCallum said the British public has a ‘vital role to play’ in maintaining the nation’s resilience as threats become increasingly insidious, including online.
He called for people consuming news to ‘think about what you’re willing to believe, from whom, and why’, and urged parents worried that their child is ‘being taken down some dark paths on the internet’ to have a word with a teacher or someone else they trust in their community.
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