UK plans information defence centre as AI deepfake threat grows

A new National Centre for Information Defence will help the UK government tackle the growing threat of disinformation and AI-enabled information attacks from hostile states. According to a release, the Centre will “bring together intelligence agencies, law enforcement and social media companies, with a remit to detect, attribute and disrupt foreign information attacks, while helping communities build resilience to disinformation.”

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham devoted a chunk of his speech at the UN General Assembly to emphasizing the threat coming from Russia. Declaring that “we will not play Russia’s game of trading escalatory rhetoric,” Burnham frames the threat from deepfakes and AI-assisted trickery in existential terms, suggesting that hostile states are attacking the “strong, cohesive society” that underpins “everything we hold dear and everything we want to achieve.”

“In recent years we have seen an industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK and that of many of our allies,” he says. “Russian agencies have used every means at their disposal to spread lies and disinformation and prey on people’s fears.  We’re talking about an insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community – creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sowing despair.”

“Today I am asking our security chiefs to begin work on a new National Centre for Information Defence – to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks. To support and defend our democracy.”

As a newly minted PM, Burnham may be adding rhetorical flourishes to the issue for some pomp. But the political capital he is devoting to it suggests that Russia has been actively meddling with volatile UK political sentiment on a scale not many outside government comprehend.

iProov CEO notes alignment with cyber resilience framework

Some in the identity industry are skeptical that Burnham’s government has the expertise it needs to build a fortress around the UK’s information environment. In a release, Andrew Bud, CEO of iProov, says “the new National Centre for Information Defence will have an important role to play, but its success will depend on how quickly it can move from identifying threats to actually disrupting them.”

The scale and pace of the deepfake threat, for example, may be too hot for regulators to handle without help.

“Deepfakes are becoming too sophisticated and too scalable for the government to rely on individuals or platforms simply spotting fake content after the fact,” Bud says. “The Centre should be looking at the infrastructure behind these attacks, including how we verify that the people, accounts and communications we interact with online are genuine.”

A more comprehensive approach to verification, he believes, presents “a clear opportunity to connect this work with the UK’s emerging cyber resilience framework.”

“The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill recognises the need to protect the authenticity and integrity of data as part of securing essential services and this same principle needs to extend to the authenticity of the people and digital interactions those services rely on,” Bud says.

“That means bringing identity verification and deepfake detection into the centre of the UK’s defensive strategy, alongside intelligence sharing and public education. If AI is industrialising deception, our response needs to be able to tell genuine from synthetic.”

Deepfake threat grows as detection gets harder

As politicians and tech overlords wrestle over the question of whether or not to stop out of control AI development from destroying human society as we know it, damage from the AI that’s already available continues to get worse. The 2026 Deepfake Fraud Detection Market Report from Biometric Update and Goode Intelligence forecasts that deepfake fraud attempts will exceed 334 million annually by 2028.

New data from Gartner shows that 41 percent of CISOs reported at least one social engineering incident involving a deepfake over the past year, as AI increases the volume, personalization and credibility of social engineering schemes.

And overconfidence remains high, with the Avast 2026 Safe Tech Report showing that 56 percent of adults worldwide are “convinced they’d catch an AI fake the moment they saw one.”

The U.S. is also taking new action against deepfakes, with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expanding its testing of remote identity verification technology to target AI-generated identity documents and biometric deepfakes, and adding a dedicated deepfake detection challenge to the 2026 Remote Identity Validation Rally (RIVR).

Article Topics

AI fraud  |  cybersecurity  |  deepfakes  |  iProov  |  Russia  |  UK