MI5 launches AI Threat Assessment Centre as bioweapon fears rise

Key facts

• MI5 Director General Ken McCallum established the AI Threat Assessment Centre (AITAC) to assess AI-enabled threats and align cross-government analysis.
• McCallum said MI5 has caught terrorists using AI to improve reconnaissance and attack methods, and highlighted AI-enabled drone risks.
• McCallum attached the “greatest weight” to AI potentially changing the stakes on bioweapons, including spreading dangerous know-how and the risk of novel pathogens.

3 minute read

MI5 is moving to formalise and centralise its approach to AI-enabled threats through the creation of the AI Threat Assessment Centre (AITAC), announced by Director General Ken McCallum during the agency’s annual threat update in London. McCallum framed AI as a strategic inflection point with few historical analogues, arguing that the pace of change is compressing intelligence-warning timelines and forcing MI5 to accelerate organisational adaptation.

The immediate operational signal is that MI5 has already observed terrorists using AI to improve reconnaissance and attack methodologies, alongside concern about AI-enabled drones. The longer-horizon risk McCallum weighted most heavily is biosecurity: while not yet “realised,” he warned that AI could alter the feasibility of chemical, biological or radiological attack pathways by transferring dangerous knowledge to actors who previously lacked the expertise, and potentially enabling the design of novel pathogens. In his assessment, failure modes in model “guardrails” could provide a step-change in capability for otherwise low-capability extremists.

AITAC is intended to consolidate analysis across the UK system—bringing together inputs from the AI Security Institute, National Crime Agency and National Cyber Security Centre—so government decisions are based on a shared threat picture rather than fragmented, competitive assessments. The centre mirrors MI5’s existing structures for terrorism and state threats analysis, positioning AI as a cross-cutting enabler that can amplify multiple threat vectors rather than a discrete category.

For European security stakeholders, the UK move is a marker of where national intelligence services may rebase priorities: AI is being treated as both an accelerant for hostile state activity and a catalyst for non-state actors’ access to high-consequence capabilities. This has direct implications for European critical infrastructure protection, public-health security planning and UAS countermeasures, particularly as AI-assisted targeting, autonomy and information operations blur traditional boundaries between counterterrorism, counterintelligence and civil resilience. MI5’s elevation of national resilience to “front-rank mission status” signals a shift toward mission integration that EU states may need to mirror to avoid stovepiped responses to AI-enabled threats.

Source: Politico Europe