Britain's Got AI Talent! But When Are UK Politicians Going to Put Their Money Where Their Mouths Are?

So, here’s some good news for any government with greedy AI aspirations - which let’s face it is all of them to some degree or another. Since 2018, the UK public sector has awarded more than 2,000 contracts for AI-related projects, according to respected consultancy firm Tussell. Meanwhile a study by Mattison Public Relations finds that AI is now used across every central UK government department. Slightly more alarmingly, only 30% of those have actually put a departmental mandate in place and fewer than two-thirds (63%) of departments actually have a formal AI strategy in place that they can point to. Which rather begs the question of what exactly everyone is up to within the departments? Shadow AI, anyone? But maybe that’s something that no-one really wants to make too much of a fuss about right now. As is eternal and universal, all politicians at some point in their ascendency though the corridors of power scrabble to position themselves precariously on the bleeding edge of modernity, and right now that means being able to point to impressive sounding AI stats within your purview. Depending on who you talk to and what day of the week it is, the UK Government reckons that AI and digital transformation could deliver £45 billion to GDP in annual savings – around 3.3% of public spending, although this is explicitly not set in stone as a target, but rather as a suggestive marker of what might be achievable. Circles to square The other objective of successive post-Brexit vote governments - and bear in mind that the UK is now onto its sixth Prime Minister in ten years since David Cameron cut and ran the morning after losing the fateful vote in 2016! - is to secure as much inward investment from US Big Tech as possible, while occasionally striking a regulatory tough guy posture to impress the domestic audience. Recently the war between Trump 2.0 and Anthropic, which essentially resulted in Washington cutting off the rest of the world from frontier model tech for a few weeks, has put additional emphasis on the exposure the UK has to such politically/ideologically motives actions in the US. It’s also reminded everyone of the total lack of anything that can be done about it, such is the UK public sector’s self-inflicted dependence on US tech. For decades, major public sector contracts, funded by UK taxpayers, have been awarded to US vendors. Fair enough in some respects - the US is the dominant supplier market in the world, and however many ‘UK leading the world’ speeches a PM might give, that remains the reality. That's the price that the UK - and Europe as a whole - has paid for not supporting its own. Homegrown tech firms are hatched in London, but if they want to succeed, the routine path forward has come to be accepted as being a ticket across the Pond to Silicon Valley. It’s wasteful, it’s tragic, and we’ve no-one to blame but ourselves - and particularly our posturing policy-makers in Westminster. But again there’s a ritualistic political dance to be done here. In comes a new Minister or Secretary of State or Prime Minister and before long there’s an announcement of some bold new initiative that is finally going to reverse the historic course and allow UK firms to thrive in their home market. This is typically followed up by the same announcement being re-announced - and re-re-announced - with slightly different wording and emphasis in a bid to get several bites of what is typically a distinctly under-funded cherry to begin with! The current administration under recently annointed PM Andy Burnham is no different. His government has announced a Sovereign AI Fund aimed at supporting UK company founders and start-ups, fuelling the AI boom and contribution to the economy and all with the wider objective of boosting domestic tech sovereignty. All that for the bargain price of £500 million! For comparison, Amazon’s tech and content expenses for the 12 months to end of June topped $121 billion... Part of this largesse from the Burnham regime comes in the form of a £100 million Sovereign AI R&D Procurement Scheme, funded out of that pre-announced £500 million, which is essentially being pitched as a jolly national “first-of-a-kind competition” that anyone can take part in. The prize for UK AI start-ups for winning one of the sub-competitions will get you the chance to have a government department be an early customer of your wares in the form of contracts ranging from £250,00 to £10 million. With only £100 million in the pot, presumably the winning entries will veer more towards the lower end of that scale? The winners will get to keep ownership of all their intellectual property, while granting the UK Government a licence to use the outputs, data, and results to improve public services.The first four challenges announced cover NHS productivity - aka cutting waiting lists ; AI compute efficiency and infrastructure; defence AI; and cyber security. Couldn’t we just give state support? Cynics might argue that funding could just be offered on a grant basis to UK start-ups rather than making them jump through competitive hoops in Britain’s Got AI Talent!, but where would the photo ops be in that for the politicians, eh? A “challenge-based” approach is going to be far more fun and a damn sight more PR-friendly all round! According to the UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan: > Every year the British state spends billions procuring products and solutions tackling some of the most important challenges facing society - from health, to our national defence. This first-of-its-kind scheme will open up these opportunities to the British AI innovators whose ideas could make the biggest difference, backing their businesses to grow here, and go on to win globally. Ah yes, now this is important - while this is all about strengthening UK sovereign AI capabilities and is entirely funded by money sourced from the UK taxpayer, no restrictions are being place on what the winning entries can do with their tech. So if, as a hypothetical, a company wins a £10 million deal and gets UK Government support to scale up its tech in practice, it can then turn around and sell out to Google or NVIDIA or whoever’s cutting the biggest check that week. Nothing, not even a moratorium window, is being put in place to ensure that UK talent doesn’t continue to check in at Heathrow for the now depressing regular brain drain trip across the Atlantic. One of the most eloquent critics of the UK’s readiness to default to US Big Tech has been UK sovereign cloud platform provider Civo, Its CEO Mark Boost argues: > We have remained shackled to foreign technology monopolies for too long, operating in an environment where we pay tribute for infrastructure, a direct consequence of policy historically favouring US giants over domestic excellence. With foreign firms controlling 70-90% of the UK cloud market, we have inadvertently ceded our sovereignty. It is time to stop being tenants in our own digital economy and become architects. > > > We possess the talent and frontier models required to lead globally, and the infrastructure to do so already exists right here in the UK. Existing sovereign companies can be used as the blueprint to pave the way. The country’s infrastructure can now deliver cloud parity with legacy hyperscalers, providing native resilience, without the hidden costs or lock-in. The government must now match this ambition by shifting support to locally developed providers. The solution is ready and waiting; it just requires policy that puts UK-built technology first. Any appetite to change? But frankly, how likely is that? That post-Brexit inward investment circle still needs squaring and if that means cosying up to US Big Tech, so be it - see former PMs Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer both abandoning their dignity to 'fanboy' at the feet of Elon Musk and Jensen Huang as recent examples. Even when threats of getting tough with regulation are bandied around, these singularly fail to deliver. The UK Com