Summary
Why the UK is pioneering an initiative to develop a national scale, sovereign defence capability In her recent inaugural GCHQ Annual Lecture at Bletchley Park, Director GCHQ announced that: we need to reimagine cyber security in the AI world. In the past few months, GCHQ has developed the blueprint for a new national cyber defence capability that will hardwire cutting-edge agentic AI into machine speed cyber defence. Anne Keast-Butler, Bletchley Park, 27 May 2026 The NCSC and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) are developing this blueprint, which we are calling Cyber Shield. The objective of Cyber Shield is to build a national-scale, collaborative approach to agentic cyber defence, using frontier AI to identify, reduce and resolve our national cyber risk. set out why we need a new approach to cyber security, and outline our aim and vision for Cyber Shield – as well as the invite debate and engagement from academia, Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) organisations, frontier labs, the cyber defence sector and others to help collectively solve the challenges and develop the blueprint Why the UK needs a step change in cyber defence The UK faces a cyber threat that is growing in scale, speed and sophistication. Attacks from hostile states, organised crime and others are increasingly disrupting services, harming businesses and exposing sensitive data.