The UK's political elite finally embrace AI sovereignty, but is it too late?
Both Andy Burnham, the expected next British PM, and Reform, the party leading the polls, are doing lots of thinking about LLMs
Should the Prime Minister add 'Chief Technology Officer' to his official title alongside First Lord of the Treasury? That's the question which has been prompted by Danny Kruger, who's leading Reform UK's preparations for government.
The East Wiltshire MP, who once served as a Political Secretary to the PM under Boris Johnson, thinks Number 10 must have digital transformation as a chief mission if the UK is going to meet the AI challenge. As such, a CTO should sit inside the Downing Street HQ.
Speaking in Westminster earlier this week, Kruger was able to diagnose the problem facing Britain: the country has to rely on other nation states, namely the United States, for AI hardware and software and therefore lacks meaningful technological sovereignty.
At the same time, as CapEx and OpEx costs surge, an indebted UK cannot currently put up the cash required to compete at the highest levels of the LLM hardware race. So what should we do about it? Kruger wants the government to help encourage more AI SMEs and scale-ups, whilst indicating that Reform would shepherd pension funds towards British AI companies to build a network of companies and organisations that would secure some technological sovereignty.
When I pressed him on the matter, Kruger said this proposed reform, alongside favourable tax code changes, are still to be decided and Reform's Shadow Chancellor Robert Jenrick and Richard Tice would have a say on the matter.
But Kruger did reveal that Reform, which is still leading the opinion polls, is actively considering whether to allow councils to keep all business rates generated by data centres, the digital infrastructure powering the AI revolution.
As for more modest state funding being directed towards AI licence grants for businesses and schools, Kruger told me that he was 'open' to such a proposal, but, instinctively, he was against mass amounts of taxpayer funds being directed towards interventionist initiatives.
Meanwhile, up in the North of England, Andy Burnham’s team are reportedly also thinking about AI sovereignty. Like Kruger, the advisors around the expected future PM are worried about the UK’s dependency on foreign-made and controlled technologies.
“Key Burnham advisers including former tech minister Josh Simons have drafted in figures in the AI sector to help craft a new tech and AI strategy, including researchers Antonio Weiss and Martha Dacombe, according to people briefed on the discussions,” The FT has claimed (link).
“Unfettered tech boosterism is a vote-loser,” said one person who has been involved in discussions, adding that Burnham’s team had discussed a new focus on ensuring that AI technology worked for British companies and the UK public rather than US tech giants.”
It sounds like we will be seeing less US mega-caps going into Number 10, at least by its famous front door, while AI Growth Zones, designated regional hubs designed to rapidly scale AI computing infrastructure, could be for the chop under a Burnham administration.
