Five Eyes cybersecurity warning: Why AI is accelerating cyber risk and what business leaders must do now
Publish Date: 2026-06-22 10:01:00
Source Domain: www.smh.com.au
June 23, 2026 — 12:01am
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The heads of the Five Eyes cybersecurity agencies have issued a rare joint statement warning that artificial intelligence is reshaping cyber risk in months rather than years, and have urged business and government leaders to act immediately.
Released on Monday night, the statement brings together cybersecurity chiefs from the Five Eyes allies – Australia, the United States, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. It says frontier AI models are expected to exceed industry expectations and will transform both attack and defence, and that the gap between a vulnerability being found and exploited is closing fast.
“The urgency is clear. AI is not a future consideration – it is already here,” the statement says. “It lowers barriers for malicious actors and increases the speed and complexity of attacks … At the same time, AI offers powerful tools to strengthen defence.”
The warning follows a recent reminder of how quickly those capabilities are moving. On June 13, Anthropic suspended worldwide access to its two most powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after a US export control directive tied to security concerns, and Australian users lost access without notice.
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Testing by Britain’s AI Security Institute had found one of the models could break into systems about 73 per cent of the time, which Queen Mary University of London academic Gina Neff described as “a step change in capability”.
The agencies said cyber risk could no longer be treated as a purely technical matter. It was a core business risk and a leadership responsibility, they said, and boards and executives needed to be confident their defences would hold during a real attack rather than simply having controls in place.
Stephanie Crowe, head…
