Chinese spies will finally be prosecuted, the head of MI5 has declared, amid warnings “authoritarian states are behaving much more aggressively”.

Ken McCallum, the Security Service’s Director General, revealed “our teams detect massive amounts of covert activity”.

But MI5 now hopes to prosecute more spies, as Mr McCallum warned tens of thousands of UK nationals are being targeted by Beijing’s spies hoping to steal secrets.

He said the Chinese Government is not only interested in Government or military secrets and is targeting tiny pieces of information held by British businesses.

But Britain’s top spy believes more foreign spies will be prosecuted under the Government’s National Security Act.

He said ahead of an unprecedented security summit in Silicon Valley: “We won’t be bringing those cases immediately, because these things weren’t criminal offences until recently.

“But yes. As we proceed further, you would expect to see our police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts will more often draw relevance to state threats in the way that is entirely routine on our counter-terrorism work.

“But typically, on state threats work over the last many years, we’ve often had to disrupt activity because it has been damaging, but it has not always been possible to prove a serious criminal offence and we are now in a different position.”

Mr McCallum, speaking in Palo Alto ahead of the Five Eyes summit where the heads of the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australian intelligence agencies met in public for the first time, said Western allies are at a “historic” crossroads as technology advances at an astonishing rate.

He said: “We are in a different World now from the World we’ve all lived in since the end of the Cold War.

“Authoritarian states are behaving much more aggressively. Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is only the ugliest and most visible example of that.

“But it’s far from the only aspect of this global contest that we need to care about.

“We are at a historic moment where emerging technologies – AI, quantum computing, synthetic biology, are leaping forward in ways that will change our world at a pretty fundamental level.

“But the nations that lead the way on them will command immense power and authoritarian states are laser focused on this.

“We know that because they’ve said so publicly.

“And we know it because week by week, our teams detect massive amounts of covert activity by the likes of China in particular, but also Russia and Iran.”

Intelligence chiefs have warned Beijing is interested in more people than ever before, with targets in businesses, academia, Government departments and the military.

Mr McCallum said: “If you think about critical infrastructure operators, you’re talking really at the scale of hundreds rather than tens of thousands. Where we are now is that critical infrastructure work still matters, but you do need to scale up and reach more smaller companies.

“You can’t do that in the same way. You can’t hope to sort of have a kind of aircraft hangar full of security experts that go out and speak to all of these small companies, you have to reach them in a more distributed, digital, public way. Hence, events like the one we’re currently here for.”

Asked if this means tens of thousands of British businesses may be vulnerable to Beijing’s spies, Mr McCallum said: “I think that must be right.”

A Beijing spy, using a string of fake names, attempted to woo thousands of civil servants, scientists and academics in a plot to steal secrets.

The spy, whose main alias was Robin Zhang, is also said to have created sham companies to entice his targets into handing over classified Government information.

They were lured with offers of thousands of pounds in cash, lucrative private sector jobs and all expenses paid for trips.

Mr McCallum said foreign states are using “Cold War style tactics” to recruit people online.

He said: “Most commonly, that first approach is made online often through professional networking sites.

“I think what’s most striking about what we see in our investigations at the moment is that it is not the case that people come in with a deeply specific, precise, surgical requirement and steal one thing and then go.

“We see very, very widespread gathering of information at quite a low threshold – lots of the information that has been taken may not on its face look like it is a sort of material loss to the West.

“But if you aggregate it across thousands of examples of small amounts of information being pulled together, you can see that that adds up to real damage which is why our adversaries are engaged in exactly this world.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray went a step further than Mr McCallum, declaring: “China has made economic espionage and stealing others’ work and ideas a central component of its national strategy and that espionage is at the expense of innovators in all five of our countries.

“Economic espionage is not an entirely new topic to us. There has been an exponential growth in our work in this area over the last few years.

“I think the FBI has seen about a 1300 per cent increase in investigations over the last several years that are specifically focused on efforts to steal intellectual property or trade secrets or things along those lines that almost invariably trace back to the government of China.

“We’re well north of about 2000 investigations.

“It’s all 56 FBI field offices. It covers almost every sector that you can imagine.

“There was a time not that long ago when we were opening a new investigation, again, I’m just talking about China, roughly every 12 hours. And I can assure you that it’s not because the FBI doesn’t have enough else to do.

“The portion of that work that is attributable to China dwarfs that of any other country.”

Mr Wray vowed FBI investigators will hunt Chinese spies attempting to wreak havoc in America.

He said: “As long as the Chinese government keeps flouting the rule of law and threatening to undermine our economic security, it is going to find us there, disrupting their hostile designs, defending our security together, not just as governments but as five joined societies with public servants, private citizens, businesses, united against the threat.”

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