The UK's National Cyber Security Centre is planning a cyber defence system that will see AI agents “run national-level operations on behalf of the country" – and it wants help.

The NCSC has called for industry and academic partners to help it build a national fleet of “red” and “blue” AI agents to deliver the so-called UK Cyber Shield.

“The UK will…provide a case study to the world on how to successfully engineer and deliver the future of active cyber defence in the AI era,” said the NCSC’s deputy CTO Peter Haigh and capability director “Harry G.”

Writing in an NCSC blog published on July 7, they said that the UK Cyber Shield’s AI agents will find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities across the UK.

This will entail “automated scanning of critical UK IP ranges for exposed vulnerabilities analysis of aggregated data to understand national level exposure” – and initially focus on the “government and critical UK sectors.”

The first public hint of these plans came in a May 27 speech by GCHQ Director Anne Butler-Keast. (GCHQ is the NCSC’s parent agency.)

In it, she said (without sharing any further details) that the agency has “developed the blueprint for a new national cyber defence capability [that] will hardwire cutting-edge agentic AI” into national cyber defences.

“Our aim is to transition to commercially-scalable solutions to deliver a level of national resilience which is ready for the future threat,” they said, including “automation of workflows to allow rapid national-scale mitigation.”

The two NCSC leaders added: “The Cyber Shield vision is ambitious… It cannot be developed and operated by the NCSC or government alone."

They called for industry and academia to help “develop innovative approaches and evidenced solutions from national- to enterprise-scale.” 

The NCSC is working with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to “establish effective pathways for partners.”