How will AI enable the crimes of the future?

Criminal misuse of advanced AI is already here. As this technology develops, criminals may become faster, more difficult to detect, and harder to stop.

Frontier AI is an exceptionally powerful tool: for individuals, companies, and – unfortunately – for criminals too. We are already seeing AI used to support cybercrime , social engineering , impersonation scams , and more.

At the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), we’re working to understand and mitigate this growing risk. This blog sets out our approach.

To support these research efforts, we’re currently hiring for a Criminal Misuse Workstream Lead , as well as a Research Scientist and Research Engineer to build evaluations on multimodal and AI agents capabilities.

We empirically evaluate the potential of AI systems to support criminal misuse and identify whether inflection points have been reached through our technical research. This includes:

We are working to build the evidence base needed to support future decision-making. This includes exploring potential interventions at the model and deployment level, assessing how system design choices may influence risk, and engaging with stakeholders across government.

As frontier AI models get more powerful, AI-enabled crimes have become increasingly sophisticated and challenging to detect. Our concerns centre on three key capabilities of AI systems that are advancing rapidly:

In addition to these capabilities, widespread consumer market adoption could create new attack surfaces and reduce barriers to criminal use. For example, companies are using compression techniques to develop (and sometimes open source) models that are small enough to be run on lightweight devices like smartphones. As these consumer applications continue to grow, it is likely that criminal exploitation will grow too.

Broadly, we split our work into three areas: risk modelling , technical research , and interventions to address this challenge. Our research is strengthened through active collaboration with National Security partners and Serious Crime experts within His Majesty’s Government (HMG), whose expertise and insights directly inform our approach.