The Government has warned that every business in the UK must step up its cyber defence in the wake of a new generation of potentially dangerous AI models heralded by Anthropic’s superhacker LLM, Mythos.

In an open letter to British firms, the UK tech secretary, Liz Kendall, and security minister, Dan Jarvis, said that the evolution of advanced AIs like Mythos, “capable of doing work that previously required rare expertise…at a speed and scale that would have been impossible even a year ago”,  poses a serious and escalating threat to industry.

Noting that recent testing by the AI Security Institute has indicated that AI cyber capabilities are accelerating faster than had been previously thought, doubling every four months, the Government said it is vital that businesses are prepared for the abuse of frontier AI models by criminals.

“For years, the most serious cyber-attacks have relied on a small number of highly skilled criminals. That is now shifting,” wrote ministers.

“A new generation of AI models are becoming capable of doing work that previously required rare expertise: finding weaknesses in software, writing the code to exploit them, and doing so at a speed and scale that would have been impossible even a year ago.

“Criminals will not just target government systems and critical infrastructure. They will target ordinary companies, of every size, in every sector. Attackers go where defences are weakest.”

That warning may have come a little late, however, with a flood of research over the last year proving that threat actors have fully embraced AI.

For example, more than a quarter of firms in the UK have already fallen victim to AI data poisoning, while AI-powered deepfake fraud exploded more than 2,100% in the three years since the release of ChatGPT, resulting in single losses as high as £20 million. 

Despite the impact of AI-enabled attacks, the Government is adamant it’s not too late for firms to mitigate their impact. As a first step, ministers recommended that boards take an active interest in the security of even the most basic systems, cautioning that this is “not an issue to delegate to your IT team and forget about”.

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Businesses are also encouraged to utilise the government’s Cyber Governance Code of Practice, Cyber Action Toolkit and Cyber Essentials certification scheme to help them build their defences and plan for incident response. 

While cyber defence is the best offence, businesses should also aim to keep abreast of the National Cyber Security Centre’s advice, including the free Early Warning service, which can alert firms to the presence of malware and vulnerabilities affecting their network.

“The businesses that act now – that treat cyber security as an essential part of running a modern company, not an optional extra – will be the ones best placed to thrive through it and seize its advantages,” said ministers.