‘Global race of our lives’: how the UK aims to lead the AI revolution
Last year’s UK general election ushered in a government promising a mission-driven approach to public service.
In line with this pledge, the UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer announced a plan earlier this month to maximise the opportunities surrounding artificial intelligence. AI has loomed large in mainstream debate for years, but this new roadmap – the AI Opportunities Action Plan – is a chance for the new government to put its stamp on the future of the technology.
Speaking to the press at University College London on 13 January, Starmer laid out his intention to “mainline AI into the veins” of the country, and use it to “put more money in people’s back pockets”.
Developed by Matt Clifford, a tech entrepreneur, chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, and Starmer’s advisor on AI opportunities, the plan supports the Labour government’s core five missions. These include kickstarting economic growth; making Britain a clean energy superpower; ‘taking back British streets’ (by tackling antisocial behaviour, for example); breaking down barriers to opportunity; and building an NHS fit for the future.
Each mission will have its own specially-appointed AI lead, whose job will be to help identify where AI is instrumental in mission setting based on user needs. In the bigger picture, the plan puts AI at the centre of public service innovation. Everything from the way citizens and businesses pay tax, to how the NHS diagnoses and treats patients, to how national security threats are spotted and acted upon, falls within its scope.
As well as supporting the government’s five missions and its ambition to achieve the highest sustained growth in the G7, AI also represents an opportunity to place the UK at the centre of the next industrial revolution.
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As Starmer said in his speech: “We are all proud of our history – the first industrial nation, the cradle of engineering innovation – and I want people to look back on this generation and be proud of what we started today. That we grasped the nettle of AI. That we ran with it.”
To grasp the nettle successfully would add to UK strengths including its high-quality research and engineering capacity, capital investment expertise, and nimble regulatory power.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan is, therefore, a play for high stakes, so much so that Starmer called the window of opportunity it presented the “global race of our lives”. By focusing on AI, his government seeks to transform public services, cutting a path to “national renewal” by working with people at the centre of design, and secure the UK’s place as one of the world’s AI leaders.
What’s in the plan?
The action plan divides into three main sections outlining the government’s priorities. These sections describe “laying the foundation” to enable AI, “changing lives” by embracing the technology, and securing the UK’s future with “homegrown” AI innovation.
Each section contains a detailed recommendation based on a set of four principles. These principles stress the need for government to be on the side of innovators, invest in becoming a ‘great customer’, crowding in capital and talent, and building on UK strengths in emerging areas of innovative change.
The technique for achieving this is summed up by the government as a “Scan > Pilot > Scale” approach. In short, this approach entails mapping capabilities, developing prototypes and then applying these as widely as possible. When it comes to scaling AI, the government stresses the importance of making innovators the key beneficiaries of procurement. According to the plan, it is crucial that the UK works to change its image as a nation that, while inventive, often comes a cropper at the point of commercialisation.
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Laying the foundations of national AI excellence requires computational power infrastructure. Though the government acknowledges the country’s ability to compute at scale without necessarily owning or even operating the required infrastructure, it says countries that build AI infrastructure will “reap benefits through increased economic growth, the reinvigoration of former industrial sites and ownership of critical strategic assets”.
On that basis, the government says it is seeking to secure access to a sufficient supply of computational power (referred to in the plan as ‘Compute’).
The smallest component of this aspect of the plan is ‘Sovereign AI compute’, which refers to the government’s ability to allocate computational power to national priorities. ‘Domestic compute’ refers to computational power that, while based in the UK, may be privately owned or operated. This area has clear implications for investment and job creation in the UK, though for this the government says attracting international capital will be critical.
“International compute” refers to computational power that arises out of agreements that benefit bilateral partners across borders. The government states its aim of pursuing these partnerships “proactively… while also taking an active role in the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking”.
To expand its computing capacity, the government will create AI Growth Zones (AIGZs): areas with “enhanced access to power and support for planning approvals” that can speed up the process of planting infrastructure on UK soil.
The first zone is scheduled to be built in Culham, Oxfordshire, which is home to the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Health and security implications
Public services in which AI most noticeably changes lives – and saves them – tend to be those provided by the NHS. AI is already showing great potential in simplifying administrative tasks and improving the method and quality of diagnoses. AI assistants, for example, fulfil repetitive tasks that currently seize up to 20% of an NHS employees’ time.
Through its £21m AI Diagnostics fund the government says the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) is supporting the deployment of technologies in “key, high-demand areas such as chest X-Ray and chest CT scans to enable faster diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer in over half of acute trusts in England”.
A standout figure from the plan relates to DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures. The platform is estimated to have saved the equivalent of 400 million years of researcher time.
Protecting society from harm also means safeguarding its information systems. The plan points out that police teams in the UK use AI to detect threats and anomalies on social media.
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National and economic security have been key to the now governing Labour party’s agenda ever since the announcement of the 2024 general election. The AI action plan dovetails into this, with a pledge to deliver both. In terms of economic security, the government recognises that AI systems are “increasingly matching or surpassing humans across a range of tasks”, and that frontier models were trained with “10,000 times more computing power” last year than models in 2019. A similar rate of growth by 2029 looks likely, by which time AI could emerge as “a dominant factor in economic performance and national security”.
The plan also stresses that Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are only a preview to much more powerful tools. Such models are likely to come under what are called ‘agentic systems’: systems that once given an objective can “reason, plan and act to achieve it”. Developments like these are why the government has insisted the UK become an “AI maker, not just an AI taker”.
To that end, government proposes creating UK Sovereign AI, a new unit that is to join forces with private sector under a strict mandate to maximise the UK’s stake in frontier AI. This could remove barriers to innovation and generate the kinds of deals that would put UK national champions in an advantageous position to lead the sector.
Structuring the unit like this aims to channel direct investments into promising start-ups, build and coordinate computational sites, lure industry leaders to base themselves in the UK, and open the way to close collaboration with the national security community.
Feedback from beyond Westminster
Responses to the plan from organisations beyond government have been broadly positive. Technology trade association, TechUK, for example, described the plan as “comprehensive in scope”, adding that if executed effectively, it could “spark a ‘quiet AI revolution’ in how government and businesses operate”.
However, its own analysis of the government’s plan highlights a lack of clarity around “compute timelines and visa reforms”, as well as “notable gaps” around semiconductor supply planning, and a lack of commitment to securing an exascale computer. In 2023, the UK’s then Conservative government announced its intention to host a “next-gen supercomputer” with 50 times the power of the country’s current leading system in Edinburgh.
TechUK has called in the past for more regulatory firepower, greater accountability and clearer direction on AI. It urged the government to provide “additional funding to support the UK’s regulatory landscape”, as well as to create clear channels of communication with business, academia and civil society to enable the UK to shape the global conversation around responsible AI governance.
Gaia Marcus, director of the UK’s Ada Lovelace Institute, said that the Action Plan’s “underpinning principles of shared economic prosperity and improved public services” were welcome. Particularly encouraging, she said, was the government’s commitment to “smarter procurement” and “better resource regulators via the Spending Review”.
She warned however that the public held “nuanced and often strong views on the use of their data, particularly in areas such as health”. The sharing of medical data has proved a thorny issue, placing pressure on government to “think carefully about the circumstances under which this kind of sharing will be acceptable”. To this end, Marcus said greater public engagement and deliberation would be essential to the plan’s overall success.
The Alan Turing Institute’s chief executive, Jean Innes, is reported to have said that the plan offers “an exciting route map”, and praised the government’s focus on AI safety and “an ambition to sustain the UK’s global leadership” in the technology.
The first and final word
The AI Opportunity Action Plan begins and ends with a note from Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology. In the foreword, he stressed the UK’s “particular responsibility to provide global leadership in fairly and effectively seizing the opportunities of AI”, while underscoring in the conclusion that the government must have “self-confidence and ambition to set an example for the rest of the economy” through its approach. Business as usual, he adds, is “not an option”.
“Government will need to be prepared to absorb some risk in the context of uncertainty. This will require a whole-of-government commitment, with senior and visible leadership and a relentless focus on driving progress,” he said.
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
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