Today, Britain is the third largest AI market in the world. We are home to an extraordinary array of global talent and pioneering AI firms like Google DeepMind, ARM, and Wayve. But despite our record of scientific discovery - from Alan Turing on algorithms and general-purpose computing to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web - the UK risks falling behind the advances in Artificial Intelligence made in the USA and China.

In this next phase of AI development, we want Britain to step up; to shape the AI revolution rather than wait to see how it shapes us. Because we believe Britain has a particular responsibility to provide global leadership in fairly and effectively seizing the opportunities of AI, as we have done on AI safety. That is why one of my first acts as Secretary of State was to commission Matt Clifford to devise an AI Opportunities Action Plan for the British government.

This plan shows how we can shape the application of AI within a modern social market economy. We will do so by working closely with the world’s leading AI companies, Britain’s world leading academics and entrepreneurs, and those talented individuals keen to start-up and scale-up their businesses here. Our ambition is to shape the AI revolution on principles of shared economic prosperity, improved public services and increased personal opportunities so that:

• AI drives the economic growth on which the prosperity of our people and the performance of our public services depend;
• AI directly benefits working people by improving health care and education and how citizens interact with their government; and
• the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.

Across government, we have already taken decisive action to support the AI sector and take down the barriers to growth. Our transformative planning reforms will make it easier to build the data centres that are the engines of the AI age. Skills England will help ensure that British people are prepared for jobs in the AI-powered industries of tomorrow. The Digital Centre of Government I have created in my Department will drive forward the technological transformation of the state, ensuring that public services offer citizens the same seamless experience they can find in the private sector.

The recommendations in this plan are unapologetic in their ambition; Government must be the same. Delivering our AI vision for Britain requires lots of hard work, some tough choices, and a commitment to real partnership between public and private sectors. There’s no time to waste. Today, we have set out how we will rise to the challenge.

The Rt Hon Peter Kyle MP
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology

The opportunity

AI capabilities are developing at an extraordinary pace. If this continues, artificial intelligence (AI) could be the government’s single biggest lever to deliver its five missions, especially the goal of kickstarting broad-based economic growth. It is hard to imagine how we will meet the ambition for highest sustained growth in the G7 - and the countless quality-of-life benefits that flow from that - without embracing the opportunities of AI.

Any national AI plan needs to be founded on a realistic assessment of the country’s strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately, the UK has solid - and in places genuinely world-leading - foundations on which to build:

• Strong fundamental AI research, and high-quality research and engineering talent coming out of our universities, which are some of the best in the world for AI.
• A vibrant startup and scaleup scene, with an increasingly skilled and experienced entrepreneurial workforce and growing quantities of sophisticated capital available for ambitious companies.
• Leading frontier AI companies in London, including Google DeepMind’s headquarters, significant OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Meta AI offices, as well as emerging local winners - such as Wayve, the autonomous vehicle company.
• Global leadership on AI safety and governance via the AI Safety Institute, and a proportionate, flexible regulatory approach.

These are all crucial prerequisites to making the most of AI opportunities; without them, the ambition in this plan would not be credible. However, we cannot be complacent: to remain a world leader we need to lead in both building and using AI. Our goal should be a thriving domestic AI ecosystem, with serious players at multiple layers of the “AI stack” and widespread use of AI products and services across the economy.

The UK’s starting point makes this aspiration plausible, but achieving it will require bold and visionary action. The government must:

• Invest in the foundations of AI: We need world-class computing and data infrastructure, access to talent and regulation (Section 1).
• Push hard on cross-economy AI adoption: The public sector should rapidly pilot and scale AI products and services and encourage the private sector to do the same. This will drive better experiences and outcomes for citizens and boost productivity (Section 2).
• Position the UK to be an AI maker, not an AI taker: As the technology becomes more powerful, we should be the best state partner to those building frontier AI. The UK should aim to have true national champions at critical layers of the AI stack so that the UK benefits economically from AI advancement and has influence on future AI’s values, safety and governance (Section 3).

This Action Plan is made up of three sections - one for each of these goals. There are detailed recommendations in each. In making them, I have tried to draw consistently on a small number of core principles:

• Be on the side of innovators: In every element of the Action Plan, the government should ask itself: does this benefit people and organisations trying to do new and ambitious things in the UK? If not, we will fail to meet our potential.
• Invest in becoming a great customer: government purchasing power can be a huge lever for improving public services, shaping new markets in AI, and boosting the domestic ecosystem. But doing this well is not easy - it will require real leadership and radical change, especially in procurement.
• Crowd in capital and talent: The UK is a medium-sized country with a tight fiscal situation. We need the best talent around the world to want to start and scale companies here. If we do that, the best investors globally will want to deploy capital here - both into our startups and our AI infrastructure.
• Build on UK strengths and catalytic emerging areas: The UK has strong companies in the AI application and integration layers that are well positioned to grow. We also have emerging areas of research and engineering strength - particularly in AI for science and robotics - that could have a transformational impact across the economy, advance AI and unlock further innovation.

No one can say with certainty what AI will look like a decade from now. My judgement is that experts, on balance, expect rapid progress to continue. The risks from underinvesting and underpreparing, though, seem much greater than the risks from the opposite. Even if AI progress slows, we will see large benefits from deploying today’s frontier capabilities and investing in our infrastructure and talent base.

If, however, capabilities continue to advance, having a stake in - and being the natural home of - advanced AI could be the difference between shaping the future of science, technology and work and seeing these decisions made entirely outside our borders. This is a crucial asymmetric bet - and one the UK can and must make .