The Chancellor will commit hundreds of millions of pounds in next week’s Budget to AI as the Government plans to develop a ‘distinctively British approach’ to the powerful technology.
John Healey’s £600million package will aim to guard against the risks of AI while aiming to harness its power for economic advantage across the UK.
Ahead of his maiden statement on Wednesday, he said AI would ‘transform daily life’ and ‘every firm, community, hospital, school and every aspect of our economy’ could benefit from AI.
He said he understood growing concerns that AI would take away people’s jobs which is why he would be ‘setting out a distinctively British approach to AI – one that doesn’t leave workers behind and defends our national interest, while ensuring the benefits of AI-enabled growth are felt right across the country’.
A new AI Centre of Excellence – in Manchester – is planned alongside AI investments in areas including Edinburgh.
The Government will also spend £300million backing an AI Biosecurity Lab which will look at protections from emerging biological threats.
The lab will be a public-private partnership supported by leading AI developers including ChatGPT creators OpenAI and Anthropic, makers of the Claude AI tool.
They will provide £200million worth of AI model credits that can be spent on the use of their models.
John Healey’s £600million package will aim to guard against the risks of AI while aiming to harness its power for economic advantage across the UK
An additional £120million will also be committed by the Chancellor to the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI).
The lab, set up by the former Conservative government in 2023, has taken a central role in evaluating AI risks.
Other investments include £60million investment in a ‘National Cyber Shield’ to boost cyber-defences, and £70million funding towards a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability Centre.
Alongside this, millions will be spent on research to understand how AI will change jobs and industry.
The measures were announced in an official press release from the Treasury today.
And in a sign of the Government’s grand AI ambitions, the government’s AI minister Kanishka Narayan told the BBC today that the UK Government will provide leadership to the world on AI.
However, it all came in the week Barclays Bank announced 5,000 job losses thanks to the rollout of AI across the bank and the Government warned households to be prepared for an emergency, including one potentially triggered by AI, by stockpiling supplies.
There are also growing fears over the power of rogue AI agents which have been responsible for a series of high-profile hacks.
OpenAI, which suspended operations after one such hack, also announced today that it would restart its work.
But talking up the role the UK could play on the world stage in AI, AI Minister Mr Narayan said the UK was ‘unique because it could claim capability and claim trust’ in AI.
Hailing what he said would be ‘a significant set of investments in AI’ which would give ‘young people a chance to shape it’, he said:
‘Other countries look to us. Next year, when we take the leadership of the G20, the PM and I will bring together the most influential countries in the world and put AI at the top of the agenda and we will lead on making it safe both for ourselves and others as well.’
He told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘AI has proliferated elsewhere. The risks often emanate elsewhere so unless you are able to convene the world and play an honest broker which is what we are going to do, it is very hard to mitigate all the risks.’
He said the UK had failed to capitalise on the last tech boom and ‘we were therefore not in charge and reliant on American social media giants and reliant on big tech hosting our data’.
‘The central political faultline is not whether you’re pro AI or anti AI but it is ‘are you passive in the face of AI or are you actively shaping it in the interests of your public and your country?’ he added.
Asked why we had to embrace it at all as many people had suggested, he said: ‘The choice for us when it comes to jobs etc. is not whether we will be more productive or otherwise, the choice is “do jobs go to other countries which are moving radically faster and becoming more productive?”‘
Mr Narayan, who this week also compared the growth of AI to the Victorian-era Industrial Revolution, said 10,000 work placements would also be made available for young people in digital and tech firms.
‘The fundamental thing is that the British public and democracy has to assert power rather than leave it to tech bros and oligarchs,’ he told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast.
