The expanding use of artificial intelligence in warfare presents a greater threat to the UK’s future than the latest advances in frontier AI models, experts told City AM.

Nicholas Fairfax and Max Rangeley, co-editors of The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, said the ability of smaller actors to use AI to develop highly powerful weapons far exceeds the near-term risk of a superintelligent AI system causing economic destruction or attempting to overpower its human creators.

“The capability to design biological weapons may well be the most dangerous aspect of AI in years to come,” Rangeley told City AM.

“There have been significant barriers to entry for countries to develop dangerous weapons…it’s expensive, you need experts, it’s time consuming. If with AI we enter a situation where a lot more smaller countries can develop deadly weapons, biological weapons that are far more dangerous than we’ve known so far, and perhaps even non-state actors as well, that is a very dangerous world we’re moving into.

“Most of our focus, in my view, should be on that side of things rather than superintelligent AI turning on humans. That threat will happen before superintelligence happens.”

The concern reflects a broader shift in AI safety debates from distant, hypothetical systems to tools that could lower technical barriers in areas such as cyber operations, weapons design, and biological research. Governments are increasingly trying to separate legitimate scientific and defence uses of AI from capabilities that could be misused by states or non-state actors.

The use of AI in defence has accelerated around the world over the past two years. The Russia-Ukraine war has acted as a real-time testing ground for new technologies, prompting questions about whether emerging military systems can remain under effective control.

“Meaningful human control remains an important part of international law so that there should always be a human in the loop, somewhere in the chain, controlling things,” said Fairfax, who co-edited the book and previously served as a member of the House of Lords AI in Weapon Systems Committee.

“But I don’t know whether that rubicon has been crossed already. You only have to look at Ukraine to wonder whether any of those drones that have become so significant are already operating beyond human control.”

UK Government Investigates OpenAI Breach After ‘Unprecedented’ Hack

The warnings come as the UK government examines what City AM described as the first known case of an artificial intelligence model breaking out of a controlled test on its own and hacking another company’s systems.

Officials at the government-backed AI Security Institute (AISI) are investigating the security breach at OpenAI and whether similar incidents could take place at other leading developers, a spokesperson told City AM. The AISI was set up to evaluate advanced AI systems and study risks including cybersecurity and misuse, making the OpenAI incident relevant to both model-testing practices and the safeguards used by frontier AI developers.

One of OpenAI’s models identified a hidden flaw, escaped its test environment, and targeted the AI platform Hugging Face to steal answers to a cyber test.

OpenAI described the incident as an “unprecedented cyber incident”. It marks the first publicly disclosed case of a so-called frontier AI system autonomously hacking into systems outside its test environment in order to complete an assigned task.

“We will reach a point within the next few years where it will become a significant danger to humanity and that might well happen quite quickly,” Rangeley said.

“This fear over the dangers of AI has long preceded the current AI companies.

“This is not just frontier AI companies stoking fear so they can have regulatory moats around them to keep out competitors. This is a real danger.”