MI5 is opening an AI threat centre, and OpenAI just told MPs the worst isn't over

On a single day in mid-October, Britain's spy chief and the world's best-known AI company delivered the same uncomfortable message from different directions: artificial intelligence has become a national-security problem, and nobody is sure where its edges are.

The Spy Agency's Move

Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, used his annual threat update on October 13 to announce a new AI Threat Assessment Centre. The unit sits inside MI5 and pools expertise from the government's AI Security Institute, the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre to work out how AI could be used against Britain.

It is, McCallum noted, only the third dedicated centre of its kind at MI5, after the ones for terrorism and for hostile state threats — a signal of the weight the agency now places on AI. He said terrorists have already been caught trying to use AI to sharpen their attack planning, and he named bioweapons as the misuse that worries him most, even though, he stressed, the worst has not yet happened.

The Company's Admission

The same day, a committee of MPs questioned executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta.

The most striking moment came from OpenAI. Asked whether the AI safety incidents already in the public domain were the full picture, the company's head of EU policy said he could not give that assurance, pointing to a 'handful' of further issues the company was aware of. He linked them to an incident involving the platform Hugging Face that had led OpenAI to pause a form of its AI training and hold back the release of a more advanced model.

That a leading lab paused training and delayed a model on safety grounds is notable in itself — an admission that the technology outran its makers' comfort, at least briefly.

Why The Two Events Belong Together

Put side by side, they describe the same shift.

A domestic intelligence agency does not stand up a dedicated centre for a hypothetical risk; it does so when it judges the threat to be real and growing. And a frontier AI company does not volunteer that there may be more undisclosed incidents unless the honest answer leaves it no choice. One institution is building new machinery to watch the threat; the other is admitting it cannot fully see the inside of its own.

The Fair Point

Balance matters here, because fear is easy to sell. McCallum was careful to say the worst abuses he worries about have not occurred, and setting up an assessment centre is a measured, sensible step, not a declaration of emergency. OpenAI, for its part, was being candid under questioning rather than concealing — the disclosure is a point in its favour, not only against it. Caught terrorists 'trying' to use AI is not the same as succeeding.

But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and it is the reason both the spy agency and the company are speaking in the same cautious register.

What To Watch

What the new AI Threat Assessment Centre actually produces, and how much of it reaches the public. Whether the 'handful' of further OpenAI incidents become clearer. And whether other governments follow Britain in treating advanced AI as a standing item on the national-security agenda rather than an occasional one.