A major cyberattack causes widespread critical infrastructure disruption in the United Kingdom before the end of 2027.
Public concern persists over foreign and non-state cyber operations targeting national infrastructure. Resolution requires official UK government confirmation of significant disruptions to energy, transport, or health systems.
Across 6 frontier models answering independently, the panel thinks this is unlikely: the median is 22%.
They broadly agree, 18 points between GPT at 29% and Qwen at 11%.
Nothing is settled until 31 Oct 2029, when the outcome is checked against sources and every number above gets a permanent score.
What each one said
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GPTOpenAI
It turns on whether persistent hostile access becomes a cascading outage that ministers publicly attribute as cyber-caused.
- UK bodies including NCSC, operators and ministers must document major disruption to energy, transport or health before 31 December 2027.
- States and criminals routinely probe UK infrastructure, but confirmed cyber-caused nationwide critical-service disruption remains rare versus ransomware and IT incidents.
- A publicly attributed destructive campaign against OT systems, or escalation in a NATO-Russia/China crisis, would sharply raise the odds.
29% -
DeepSeekDeepSeek
Turns on whether a state actor or ransomware crew lands a disruptive hit on UK OT systems that ministers must publicly confirm.
- NCSC and Cabinet Office would have to confirm disruption to energy, transport or NHS; they historically downplay and attribute slowly, as with the 2017 WannaCry NHS…
- Base rate is low: the UK has had no officially confirmed nationwide critical-infrastructure outage from cyber in the past decade despite constant probing of NHS trusts…
- The 2024 Synnovis attack disrupted London hospitals but stayed regional, showing capability exists while the bar for 'widespread' remains unmet.
27% -
GeminiGoogle
Widespread failure requires cascading operational-technology disruptions that UK NCSC defenses and air-gapping usually contain.
- NHS ransomware incidents show IT vulnerability, but true infrastructure shutdowns (grid, transport) have a near-zero historical base rate.
- State actors like Russia or China maintain access but typically reserve destructive payloads for direct military conflict scenarios.
- A successful supply-chain compromise of key SCADA vendors before December 2027 would rapidly escalate this probability above 45%.
22% -
ClaudeAnthropic
Hinges on whether a severe attack (like NHS WannaCry-scale or worse) hits critical infra and gets officially confirmed as such.
- UK has seen repeated near-misses (NHS WannaCry 2017, water/electoral hacks, NCSC warnings on Russia/China) but rarely official confirmation of 'widespread' disruption.
- Base rate for a confirmed major infrastructure-disrupting cyberattack in any ~3yr window is moderate-low given NCSC defenses but rising nation-state/ransomware activity.
- Threshold requiring explicit government confirmation of significant energy/transport/health disruption is a high bar that keeps probability below 30%.
22% -
GrokxAI
Turns on a state or proxy actor achieving confirmed, multi-site disruption of UK energy, transport or health before 2028.
- NCSC and ministers must publicly attribute significant outages; WannaCry 2017 is the only post-2010 UK precedent meeting that bar.
- Fourteen months remain; Russia/Iran campaigns continue but UK CNI hardening and Five Eyes sharing have raised the bar since 2022.
- A sudden Ukraine-war escalation or unpatched OT zero-day would most shift the odds; otherwise isolated ransomware stays below threshold.
22% -
QwenAlibaba
Requires both a successful large-scale breach and UK government publicly confirming it — a double hurdle rarely cleared in 14 months.
- Base rate: only WannaCry/NHS (2017) and Colonial Pipeline (2021) approach this threshold in Western nations over the past decade, giving roughly one qualifying event per…
- The UK's NCSC and CNI operators have hardened since 2017, and 'widespread' plus official confirmation sets a bar above a single-sector incident.
- A sharp escalation — e.g., Russian retaliation against UK support for Ukraine targeting the National Grid — would be the most likely trigger that moves this above 20%.
11%
6 of 6 models answered · 18 points between the highest and lowest. None was shown the market price.
Question sourced from a news sweep on 1 Nov 2026. Forecast by google/gemini-3.8-flash, anthropic/claude-sonnet-5, openai/gpt-5.6-terra, x-ai/grok-4.6, deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash, qwen/qwen3.8-max-0902 via OpenRouter.