Foreign Secretary Warns of "AI Hiroshima," Crypto Watches World's Nerds Pass Notes 🤖💣

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper warned that governments risk repeating the nuclear age's mistakes if they wait to regulate artificial intelligence, arguing that international safety agreements for AI must be reached before a crisis forces action. In an article published Monday, Cooper said AI offers breakthroughs in healthcare but also "reshaping the future of warfare, crime and social cohesion in alarming ways," and described managing the technology as potentially "the greatest security challenge of the next decade."

Cooper drew a direct parallel to the early nuclear arms race, writing that "on nuclear, international agreement came only after the world saw the terrifying power of the new technology at Hiroshima." She added: "We cannot afford to wait for an AI equivalent of Hiroshima before we act." The Foreign Secretary called on Britain to use its diplomatic channels to convene the United States, China and other major AI powers around shared safety standards, citing the 2023 AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, where leaders from 29 countries and the European Union met on frontier-AI risk, as evidence the UK can "rally the world on AI security."

Her warning lands amid escalating concern across government and the AI sector. In May, the U.K.'s AI Security Institute flagged rapid gains in AI cybersecurity capabilities after OpenAI's GPT-5.5 became the second model to complete a simulated cyberattack without human assistance, following Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview. Days later, the International Monetary Fund cautioned that AI could "amplify" cyberattacks against the global financial system by lowering the skill needed to exploit vulnerabilities, urging policymakers to treat cybersecurity as a financial-stability issue rather than a purely technical one.

In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a voluntary framework for pre-release reviews of advanced AI models, expanding AI cybersecurity programs and directing agencies to assess national-security risks from frontier systems. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued the same month that transparency requirements are no longer sufficient and called for mandatory third-party testing of frontier models, a demand followed by the U.S. government ordering Anthropic to restrict access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 over national security concerns before lifting the restrictions. Major crypto assets including $BTC and $ETH continued trading through the policy announcements without direct regulatory linkage.