UK AI Minister Calls for Regulation and Domestic AI Capacity

UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan says Britain must combine regulation with stronger state capacity and domestic AI development, according to the BBC. He said the British public and democracy must "assert power" over AI rather than leave it to "tech bros and oligarchs".

Narayan, appointed the UK's first cabinet minister for AI in July, compared the scale of the shift to the Industrial Revolution. He said Britain should avoid a repeat of that transition, which was good for the country overall but "extremely painful for too many people".

The UK Government recently spent £13,000 using frontier AI models in Whitehall to check public sector systems for cybersecurity weaknesses, Narayan said. The work found 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities, but he did not identify the affected systems. He also indicated that next week's Budget may include an AI measure, without providing details.