UK ministers grow more anxious about AI as MI5 warns of bioweapon risk
A Guardian report describes how several senior UK government figures are now privately more worried about artificial intelligence than about the cost of living, after a week in which MI5 director general Ken McCallum warned the cabinet that extremist groups could use AI to pursue bioweapons. MP Liam Byrne, chair of the parliamentary business and trade committee, said the government must now take the lead on regulation, particularly if Trump's Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections. Geoffrey Irving, former chief scientist at the UK's AI Security Institute, said open-source AI models typically catch up to paid models within less than a year and that their safety guardrails "either don't exist or can be trivially removed." Defence sources cited concern over last year's cancellation of an AI program at the Porton Down defence lab, while academic Elena Simperl of King's College London countered that more immediate risks, like hacking and addictive design, matter just as much as existential-threat scenarios. For a business, the debate shows that even a country with strong intelligence services is openly admitting it hasn't yet worked out how to effectively control the most powerful AI models.
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