MI5 chief warns of emerging AI threat at Five Eyes Summit

Speaking at the 'Five Eyes' security summit in California, Director General of MI5 Ken McCallum has warned about the emerging use of sophisticated technologies by malicious actors.

“Deep fake technologies do clearly have potential to cause all kinds of confusion and dissension and chaos in our societies.

“The technology has now become significantly more sophisticated than was previously the case. And that clearly does open up the possibility that a range of actors of various sorts, that wouldn’t necessarily just be limited to the intelligence services of adversary nations, might seek to use these technologies to influence public opinion in all kinds of ways.”

McCallum added that AI carried a range of risks, including “enabling terrorism and the spread of dangerous knowledge in ways that we would all regret”.

In their first ever joint public appearance, leaders of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership—the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—traveled to the US at the invitation of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said:

“We’ve seen people essentially using AI to circumvent safeguards … to do searches for, you know, how to build a bomb, for example, or ways to obfuscate their searches for how to build the bomb.”

Speaking on the terrorism threat posed by recent developments in the Middle East, McCallum said: 

“There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat and/or change its shape in terms of what is being targeted, in terms of how people are taking inspiration”