WIREDGOV

Open-weight AI models place powerful capabilities beyond any developer’s control. The UK should clarify how its investigatory powers apply before criminal use becomes routine.

Criminals are rapidly adopting AI. Google’s May 2026 threat report described criminals preparing a mass-exploitation campaign using a zero-day exploit assessed with high confidence to have been developed with AI assistance. Anthropic’s June 2026 analysis documented increasing model use for malware development, credential theft and data exfiltration. And in July 2026, OpenAI reported disrupting a Cambodia-based scam network that used ChatGPT to facilitate investment, romance and law-enforcement impersonation fraud. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre reached a consistent judgement at the strategic level, assessing that AI will ‘almost certainly’ continue to make cyber intrusion operations more effective and efficient, and that the proliferation of open source and commercially available models will lower the barrier to entry for a widening range of actors.

So far, most documented activity has used closed-weight models – those served by the frontier AI companies that also develop them. In contrast, open-weight models introduce new and unique risks – they provide near-frontier capabilities which could be used for criminal purposes, are widely available to anyone who intends harm, and are easier to misuse. This piece explores those risks and how UK investigatory powers might apply to them, and argues that policymakers, law enforcement and researchers need to understand them now, so that relationships, guidance and capabilities can be put in place before the use of highly capable open-weight models becomes routine in serious criminal operations.

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