What changed
MI5 is now devoting more resources to state threats than it did during the Cold War, its chief, Sir Ken McCallum, said in London on 13 October 2026.
McCallum said foreign-adversary threats had quadrupled over the past decade. Russia is the leading state threat, Iran-linked activity has produced 50 arrests in the past year, and terrorism and state-threat work are now broadly equal in scale.
Why it matters
Britain’s security service is treating espionage, cyber-attacks, sabotage and misinformation as a combined pressure campaign rather than separate problems. Russia has largely shifted toward criminal proxies after nearly 1,000 Russian spies were expelled since the invasion of Ukraine, McCallum said.
That changes the shape of the task. A threat may arrive through a criminal intermediary, an online influence operation or a cyber intrusion rather than a uniformed agent. The Kremlin’s covert network may be weaker, but the work of identifying who is acting for whom becomes harder.
Iran’s activity is also reaching beyond Jewish communities toward military sites, while extremist groups are experimenting with AI, including its integration with drones. McCallum said the most serious misuse of AI could involve extremists applying it to new and existing bioweapons.
The warning is therefore less about one imminent attack than about a security system being stretched across several kinds of danger at once. The scale of MI5’s response shows how far the centre of gravity has moved: counter-terrorism is no longer the service’s overwhelmingly dominant concern.
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