British officials are warning organisations against integrating artificial intelligence-driven chatbots into their businesses, due to an increase in risk of them performing harmful tasks.

“In a pair of blog posts due to be published Wednesday, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said that experts had not yet got to grips with the potential security problems tied to algorithms that can generate human-sounding interactions – dubbed large language models, or LLMs,” reported Reuters. 

According to the NCSC, “the AI-powered tools are seeing early use as chatbots that some envision displacing not just internet searches but also customer service work and sales calls,” said Reuters.

“Organisations building services that use LLMs need to be careful, in the same way they would be if they were using a product or code library that was in beta,” the NCSC said in one of its blog posts.

“They might not let that product be involved in making transactions on the customer’s behalf, and hopefully wouldn’t fully trust it. Similar caution should apply to LLMs.”

The NCSC said that AI powered tools could carry risks, particularly if such models were plugged into other elements of the organisation’s business processes. 

An example given by the NCSC is that an AI-powered chatbot deployed by a bank could be tricked into making an unauthorized transaction if a hacker structured their query just right.

Security implications of AI have been a subject of concern around the world with the rise of LLMs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to officials in the U.S. and Canada, hackers have begun to embrace the technology.