st year, McCallum said.

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Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Monday that the apparent plot was  almost certainly  directed by Iran's Revolutionary Guard, or IRGC. Iran has denied involvement, although it has previously said that it considers any base used to attack its territory a legitimate target.

The U.S. pulled its bombers from RAF Fairford after the incident, and the Trump administration said it believed the base faced Iranian threats intended to kill as many American troops and destroy as many U.S. planes as possible.

British officials have not confirmed that, and McCallum said that, in the U.K., Iran has so far used low-level criminal proxies who lack the capacity to mount a sophisticated large-scale attack. But he said Iran's IRGC has shown stronger capabilities in countries closer to Iran,  so it would be foolish for a person in a role like mine to discount the possibility. 

MI5 says AI could bring bioweapon risk

In a stark speech, McCallum argued that the U.K. faces a  new era of national security,  with a generational shift equivalent to the 9/11 attacks a quarter century ago. He said the myriad threats to national security now range from  arson, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion, violence  to  what online algorithms are feeding your teenagers in their bedrooms. 

McCallum said his agency's work countering state threats - chiefly from Russia, Iran and China - has quadrupled in the past decade, and claimed that both Russia and Iran are escalating hybrid warfare campaigns against the U.K. and other European countries.

He said Russia has been linked to attacks including an attempt to use an explosives-laden drone at Germany's Leipzig airport, and is  using tactics that stop short - though sometimes not much short - of conventional conflict. 

Meanwhile, technology is racing ahead, with artificial intelligence  supercharging  the cybersecurity battle between attackers and defenders, he said.

McCallum said terror plotters have used artificial intelligence for reconnaissance and attacks, including AI-enabled drones. Even more concerning, he said, is  AI's potential to change the stakes on existing or even new bioweapons. 

After the speech he told journalists at MI5's London headquarters that terror groups  would dearly love  to have chemical, biological or radiological weapons, but these are hard to obtain.

 One risk is that AI could enable dangerous knowledge to get into the hands of people we would all rather didn't have that knowledge,  he said.  A second and different risk … is the possibility that AI could generate novel pathogens not previously seen. 

McCallum said MI5 has set up a new AI Threat Assessment Center to try to keep ahead of the risks.

 Human history has given us no experience of facing an actor which is smarter than we are. It is capable of outthinking us. This is genuinely novel, and deserves the serious attention it is getting, including in MI5,  he said.