MI5 opens an AI threat centre as OpenAI tells MPs more incidents may come

Sir Ken McCallum, director general of MI5, said this about AI on 13 October. He was giving his annual threat update at MI5’s London headquarters. In the same speech, he announced a new AI Threat Assessment Centre, known as AITAC. He also said MI5 now devotes more resources to countering state threats than it did during the Cold War. Its state-threat caseload has quadrupled over the past decade, he said. AITAC sits inside MI5. It draws on experts from the AI Security Institute, the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre. Its job is to “separate the bluster from the realities”, McCallum said. It is MI5’s third centre of this kind, after its units on terrorism and state threats.