Britain's domestic intelligence chief, speaking to journalists on Tuesday, described Iran as having widened its focus toward more valuable targets — including military sites on UK soil — while Russia has been extending its interference activities against countries that support Ukraine.
Speaking at his yearly address on the range of threats facing the country, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum identified the prospect of groups pursuing political violence using AI to engineer biological weapons — or synthesise entirely new pathogens — as the foremost concern around the technology's potential misuse.
According to McCallum, the volume of state-based threats facing his organisation had grown fourfold across the past ten years, with resources now being directed toward that area at a level exceeding anything committed during the Cold War period.
Addressing reporters on Monday, Burnham attributed what he described as a probable Iranian role in an alleged plot against RAF Fairford — the English airbase that has functioned as a staging ground for US bomber missions in the region. Following that assertion, a security alert was put in place and aircraft were pulled from the air base under Trump's direction.
Tehran has contested any connection to the Fairford incident and to what officials have described over several years as a pattern of covert activity on British territory — operations said to have targeted dissidents along with Israeli and Jewish individuals.
Russia's denial of involvement in hostile acts on British and Western soil was noted, though McCallum described the country as the foremost state-level threat. He declined to address the RAF Fairford matter directly, citing an active investigation, but pointed to a pattern observed during the year in which Iranian intent appeared to be shifting toward harder targets, including military installations, and noted that the Fairford incident was not an isolated case. Cases of that kind have also appeared in countries beyond the United Kingdom, he added.
Figures released over the preceding twelve months pointed to more than 50 arrests tied to operations with links to Iran, McCallum noted.
Speaking to reporters, McCallum outlined a layered picture of state-linked threats. On Iran, he noted that operations mounted on British territory had not reached the level of more sophisticated attack methods, a gap he attributed to the relative inexperience of the criminal intermediaries and proxy networks Tehran draws upon at home, though he added that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had accumulated meaningful practical experience deploying conventional and hybrid capabilities in more assertive ways within regions geographically closer to Iran.
On Russia, McCallum placed his assessment alongside those of partner agencies across Europe, pointing to a pattern of destabilising conduct — illustrated by a drone strike attempt against a cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport and a cyber intrusion into Polish energy infrastructure — that stops short of open armed conflict. He said the timing of those efforts, while military progress in Ukraine had proved both limited and costly, was not accidental, even as Moscow disputed the German account of the airport episode.
Turning to artificial intelligence, McCallum described the technology as sharpening the contest between those attempting to penetrate digital systems and those working to protect them, with groups pursuing political violence using it to refine target research and attack planning. The area he and colleagues regarded as most pressing, he said, was AI's as-yet-unrealised capacity to alter the threat calculus around biological weapons — both established and novel — risks he described as real.
