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Freedom251 › Blog › AI Safety

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

By Freedom251 Team · · 5 min read

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MI5 has launched the AI Threat Assessment Centre (AITAC), a UK government unit that brings together intelligence and technical agencies to assess national-security dangers from artificial intelligence. The announcement came as OpenAI told MPs it could not guarantee that all previously disclosed model-related incidents were already public.

The two developments are connected by a central policy problem: governments are tracking both observed misuse and harder-to-measure future risks, while AI companies are still relying largely on voluntary safeguards and their own investigations.

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What MI5’s AI Threat Assessment Centre does

A cross-agency assessment function

MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum announced on 13 October 2026 that AITAC had been launched during 2026 and is housed within MI5. It combines expertise from the AI Security Institute, the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre.

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AITAC’s job is to produce a single, all-source assessment of AI-related national-security threats for government departments. That means bringing intelligence, criminal investigations, cyber expertise and technical analysis into one picture so officials can separate evidence from speculation and make decisions quickly. AITAC is an assessment centre, not an AI model or a consumer-facing service.

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Why MI5 created it now

MI5 says the centre must address two timelines at once. The first is present-day misuse by human adversaries. The second involves systems that could become autonomous, misaligned with human intentions or capable of producing effects that existing institutions have never had to manage.

MI5’s 2026 figures show why the agency is treating the issue as part of a wider security shift: its state-threat caseload has quadrupled over the last decade, and it says it devoted more resources to countering state threats in 2026 than during the Cold War. Since the start of 2020, MI5 and police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots.

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The threats MI5 says it is watching

Immediate misuse by terrorists and hostile actors

McCallum said, “We’ve caught terrorists seeking to exploit AI to improve their reconnaissance and attack methodologies, with AI-enabled drones adding a new twist.” This describes detected attempts to use existing AI capabilities to support operational planning and surveillance. It does not mean that AITAC has prevented an attack or that every reported threat involved an autonomous system.

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Biological and autonomy scenarios

McCallum also warned that AI could lower barriers to dangerous biological knowledge or help generate novel pathogens. Those are risk scenarios used to explain why capability assessments matter; MI5 has not said that an AI-generated pathogen attack has occurred.

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He described the prospect of a system smarter than humans and able to out-think them as “genuinely novel.” That concern is distinct from the documented cases of criminals or terrorists using AI as a tool. AITAC is intended to help officials evaluate both categories without treating a forecast as an established incident.

What OpenAI told MPs

The 16 October hearing

At a House of Commons hearing reported on 16 October, representatives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta faced questions about whether voluntary safeguards can keep pace with increasingly capable AI.

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Tom Duff Gordon, OpenAI’s head of policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, was asked whether incidents already disclosed by the company represented the complete picture. He replied: “I cannot assure the committee or you, Chair, that that is it.” He added that he knew of “a handful of others.”

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Those remarks leave open the possibility of further disclosures, but they are not a verified incident count. The contemporaneous report does not establish how many additional cases exist, what happened in them or whether they met the same reporting threshold as earlier incidents.

How the company says it would respond

Sky News reported that Duff Gordon said OpenAI would investigate urgently if MI5, MI6, GCHQ or the AI Security Institute presented evidence that a model was unsafe or had been used by a bad actor. That places the company’s response on the investigation and remediation side of the relationship, while government agencies assess threats and decide what consequences or interventions are required.

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AITAC and company safety programmes have different jobs

Dimension AITAC Company-side response described at the hearing
Institutional role MI5-hosted centre combining MI5, the AI Security Institute, the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre AI developers investigate incidents involving their models and adjust safeguards
Threat view All-source assessment of misuse, biological risks and autonomous or misaligned systems Safety and misuse risks connected to the company’s own models
Evidence Intelligence, criminal investigations, cyber expertise and technical analysis brought together for government Company disclosures, internal investigations and evidence supplied by public authorities
Authority Supports government departments that can impose policy or security measures Can investigate and remediate its systems but does not exercise government enforcement powers
Safeguard basis Government-backed assessment and response structures Voluntary safeguards were the subject of MPs’ questions

What is established, and what is not

Established by the announcements

  • AITAC was launched in 2026 and is housed in MI5.
  • It combines expertise from the AI Security Institute, National Crime Agency and National Cyber Security Centre.
  • Its remit is to provide all-source assessments of AI threats for government departments.
  • MI5 has detected terrorist efforts to use AI for reconnaissance and attack planning, including AI-enabled drones.
  • OpenAI’s representative said previously disclosed incidents may not be the only ones and referred to “a handful of others.”

Claims the evidence does not support

  • There is no authoritative public total for OpenAI’s additional incidents.
  • AITAC has not been credited with preventing a specific attack.
  • MI5 has not reported an AI-generated novel pathogen or an attack carried out by a system smarter than humans.
  • The hearing did not demonstrate that voluntary safeguards have failed; it showed that MPs are testing whether they can keep pace with capability growth.

Why the developments matter

AITAC gives UK officials a permanent place to combine signals that would otherwise sit in separate organisations. That can improve speed and consistency when a suspected threat involves criminal actors, cyber operations, foreign states and advanced models at the same time.

OpenAI’s testimony highlights the transparency problem on the company side. A statement that more incidents may exist is materially different from a counted disclosure, and the distinction matters for regulators, researchers and the public. The next significant evidence will be specific incident descriptions, the criteria used to classify them and information about whether authorities or companies identified the risks first.

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Together, the announcements show a division of labour rather than a single safety system: government agencies assess national-security consequences and coordinate powers, while model developers investigate their products and decide how to change safeguards. Both sides will be tested as AI capabilities and misuse techniques continue to evolve.

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AI SafetyAI securityMI5OpenAIUK national security

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