UK Cybersecurity Chief Warns AI Will Help Hackers Faster Than It Helps Defenders

A senior official at Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned that artificial intelligence is currently more useful to cybercriminals than to the businesses trying to stop them. Dave Chismon, the NCSC's chief technology officer for architecture, said this imbalance means AI-enabled attacks are likely to grow while automated defences struggle to keep pace.

Chismon explained that attackers benefit from a clear, technical measure of success: an exploit either works or it doesn't. Automated tools handle this kind of clear-cut goal well. Defenders, by contrast, face fuzzier problems that don't always have an obvious success state, making it harder for AI systems to know whether they've actually protected anything. He also noted that defensive actions carry real risk: a mistimed patch or an overly aggressive firewall rule can disrupt the very business systems it was meant to protect, something attackers don't have to worry about.

The warning follows similar concerns from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which said in June that frontier AI could transform offensive and defensive cyber operations within months. While software vendors have responded by issuing patches at record speed, a matching surge in AI-driven attacks has not yet been confirmed.