Inside the British Lab Hunting for Dangers Lurking in A.I.; The New York Times, May 24, 2026

 Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur, The New York Times ; Inside the British Lab Hunting for Dangers Lurking in A.I.

The government’s A.I. Security Institute, staffed by alumni from OpenAI and Google, is becoming a model for countries grappling with A.I.’s emerging risks.

"On a recent Tuesday in an Edwardian government building along Parliament Square in London, four artificial intelligence experts were busy tricking an A.I. chatbot into sharing instructions for making the deadly bioweapon anthrax...

“There are some questions that you definitely don’t want the model to give the answer to,” said Xander Davies, a 25-year-old American who leads what is known as a red team at Britain’s A.I. Security Institute. “We try really hard to get the answers out.”...

The institute’s roughly 100 employees — drawn from British intelligence agencies, academia and tech companies — have found major safety gaps in every leading A.I. model they have tested, including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. Created nearly three years ago, the organization said it had co-opted A.I. systems into sharing instructions for making chemical and biological weapons, and planning and executing cyberattacks. It publishes its research and also works with Britain’s national security agencies to identify and prepare for emerging threats."