UK throws its hat into the AI fire

In 2023, the U.K. made a big song and dance about the need to consider the harms of AI, giving itself a leading role in the wider conversation around AI safety. Now, it’s whistling a very different tune: today, the government announced a sweeping plan and a big bet on AI investments to develop what it calls a “decade of national renewal.” 

Included in the so-called “Plan for Change” will be a commitment to invest in AI to speed up public sector services; set up geographic “AI Growth Zones” to greenlight the building of AI infrastructure such as data centres and R&D areas; and a claim that private tech firms have pledged investments of £14 billion ($17 billion) and the creation of 13,250 jobs to meet this goal.

There will be more details released later in the day on action items. Some that have already been revealed include naming Culham, Oxfordshire, as the first “AI Growth Zone”; increasing public compute capacity by twentyfold and working on a new supercomputer. There’s also a new National Data Library that will be the U.K.’s way to store and use public data for AI development, and a new Energy Council that will consider how to handle the energy demands of AI.

The government says its plan is based on 50 recommendations that were laid out previously by Matt Clifford, a venture capitalist who has been advising both the current and previous administrations and published an “AI Opportunities Action Plan” in July 2024 to lay these out. 

The government today wasted very little time in trying to score a political point by noting that the outgoing government never formally said it would take these recommendations forward, while it is now “backing AI to the hilt”. (The proof will be in the pudding, of course.)

It’s very notable that the words “safety,” “harm,” “existential” and “threat” are nowhere to be found in the announcement. These are not just terms that have been raised in connection with the full-throttle embrace of AI, but specifically part of the U.K.’s own sceptical regard of the technology in previous times. It’s not that these are no longer concerns for anyone, but it seems they are no longer on the agenda for the government to address while it figures out how to profit from AI. 

“Artificial Intelligence will drive incredible change in our country,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement today. “But the AI industry needs a government that is on their side, one that won’t sit back and let opportunities slip through its fingers. And in a world of fierce competition, we cannot stand by. We must move fast and take action to win the global race. Our plan will make Britain the world leader.”

Ironically, the government notes that U.S. companies including Anthropic and Cohere are among those that have already established operations in the U.K. and have committed to backing the U.K.’s plans.

The developments come at a key moment for both technology and politics in the U.K. 

On the tech side, the country has long been the biggest market for technology investment in Europe, as well as for investment in AI startups specifically. Still, it lags far behind the U.S. on both fronts. 

A number of sizeable and trailblazing companies have been hatched and grown in the U.K. — DeepMind, the anchor of Google’s AI business, started here; chip giant ARM is British; and there are tens of thousands of startups and research groups doing groundbreaking work. But the country (along with Europe as a whole) is yet to produce a mega-business along the lines of Microsoft, Google or Apple.

The belief is that more focus on developing major U.K. hyperscalers will lead not only to helping the U.K. modernize and improve its economy — a much-needed boost since the country has been teetering on recession for years — but help the U.K. have more sovereignty in the longer run.

Sovereignty seems like a lofty ambition, but it’s an important notional bulkhead at this moment. On the side of politics, the country is at a strange crossroads. Starmer, who became Prime Minister last year, has a fractious history with incoming U.S. President Donald Trump studded with insults, and there will be some trepidation right now over how that will play out over the next four years.

More directly, Starmer has been embroiled in a tense war of words with one of Trump’s chief allies, Elon Musk. Musk does not like Starmer and wants to derail his government, going so far as to accuse the Prime Minister of being “complicit in the rape of Britain” due to the government’s response to the issue of grooming gangs, and calling him “utterly despicable,” a campaign that Starmer has dismissed as misinformation. 

The investment community seems to welcome the announcement, though its stance is seemingly guarded at the moment. Simon Murdoch, a managing partner at Episode 1 Ventures, said, “While we welcome this initiative, it will be a marathon not a sprint. It will need regular measurement and course correction to ensure adoption and then provide help to organisations like the NHS and local government to implement AI for their benefit.”

Another investor, Andrew J Scott, a managing partner at 7percent Ventures, highlighted that there needs to be more cohesion across the government if the mission is to be carried out. “The action plan won’t realise its ambition to make the UK a winner in AI unless other policies are aligned across government. If, for example, startup founder’s or VC’s leave the UK because they are taxed uncompetitively, or the NHS refuses to deploy AI technology because unions fear job losses,” he told TechCrunch.