UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan delivered a stark assessment warning that major cyberattacks leveraging artificial intelligence are highly likely, if not inevitable, given the current state of national defense readiness. Echoing warnings from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), officials cautioned that many British firms and their supply chains continue to exhibit dangerous complacency toward advanced state-sponsored and criminal threats. With frontier AI capabilities doubling rapidly and autonomous agents operating with minimal human friction, malicious actors are exploiting unpatched configurations and legacy perimeters faster than human teams can respond. Highly sensitive networks spanning healthcare, energy, financial services, and retail remain prime targets for automated reconnaissance and ransomware operations. In response to the growing threat landscape, UK has rolled out targeted funding initiatives including a new National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre and a national “Cyber Shield” framework to help businesses deploy agentic AI defenses of their own.

Full report : UK will face AI-powered attacks on critical infrastructure within two years says its AI Minister.