Building a Safer, More Secure Britain in the age of AI
Speech delivered by the Minister for Artificial Intelligence
Thank you Peter, and thank you to the entire team at Imperial College for hosting us today.
Thank you all for coming today as well.
Two hundred years ago, Britain was deep in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
Vast new industries had been created, fortunes were being made, new technologies were changing the fabric of everyday life, profoundly.
The benefits of that revolution though were not shared fairly and widely. Far from it.
In mills and factories across the country, children were being sent to work in horrifying conditions.
Our parliament had passed some laws to protect them, but those laws achieved little because the state lacked the capability to enforce them.
And so in 1833, a factory inspectorate was created - initially just four inspectors - now responsible for thousands of mills.
It was a modest beginning, and insufficient to the scale of the challenge, but it established a deeply important principle.
When technology changes the balance of power in society, the government has to protect those who bear the costs.
Crucially, to do so means more than simply passing new laws. It means creating the institutions with deep expertise to act. [POLITICAL]
Progress must serve the people whose work has made it possible.
Technological change should serve human dignity.
The state has a responsibility to ensure that its benefits are shared.
We are, once again, living through a technological revolution whose consequences will be felt for generations.
As we cross the threshold into the age of super intelligence.
The choices we make now matter. And so I am making a simple choice:
We must build machines that serve us.
Machines that help scientists discover new medicines, machines that give care workers more time with the people who depend on them, machines that help British businesses become more productive.
Above all, machines that leave us, human beings, in charge.
But if that is our defining belief, we must be prepared to put it into swift action. And we must do so now, meeting this critical moment.
The British public is right to expect that this government ought to take the risks of AI seriously. Our first responsibility is to keep our country safe.
That is why the Prime Minister decided to give me a seat at the cabinet table.
Recognising that Britain takes artificial intelligence seriously. We recognise its extraordinary potential, but we are equally determined to confront its risks.
I understand why people are naturally anxious about their jobs and what artificial intelligence means for their children’s future.
I feel that concern, that anxiety, too.
I won’t promise that we can stop change. But the Government will make a central promise to the British public: that we will never leave working people to bear the cost of this change. I will work with my colleagues every hour of every day to secure our kids’ and their kids’ future, their opportunity.
Now in recent weeks, the British public has heard extraordinary predictions from both companies and employees at the forefront of this technology.
The public is right to expect that in the face of these, the government ought to take warnings extremely seriously. And we do.
The responsibility then begins with protecting people from new social harms.
I was proud to be the minister who banned the appalling use of AI to create intimate images of women and girls without their consent.
I was proud, alongside the Secretary of State, to stand up to the richest man in the world and have our British position upheld in practice.
And I was proud to be the minister to put our children’s future above companies’ profits: announcing a social media ban for under 16s.
Wherever new harms emerge, we have acted decisively and we will continue to act decisively.
I am working hand in glove with my colleague, the Secretary of State, Lisa Nandy, to do just that.
In doing so, I also want to convey honesty. Many of technology’s new challenges extend far beyond our own borders. Increasingly capable models are distributed openly: they make it impossible to be an isolated island.
That is why the Prime Minister has made artificial intelligence a central focus of Britain’s G20 Presidency next year. We know that these challenges cannot be addressed by a single country alone, but by virtue of our capability, by virtue of the foundations of our trust, Britain will play its part.
The AI Security Institute will take a significant role in shaping our collective understanding of technical standards. And to kick that off, shortly after my speech, we will be publishing an initial view of areas where we want to see particular progress this afternoon.
Doing our bit globally, but also acting at home, we will uniquely shape a British approach, bringing the best of what makes this country the pragmatic, forward-facing country it is.
And through it, I will be guided by a non-negotiable priority: the safety of the British public.
We will use every power at our disposal. We will legislate wherever necessary. And we won’t look to law alone. We will look to British ingenuity: our scientific expertise, our technical capabilities, our institutions, to understand these increasingly powerful systems, defend against emerging threats to respond when things go wrong.
All of that starts with understanding what we are in fact dealing with.
Britain has a proud history of bringing together brilliant minds to tackle the great technological challenges of their time, from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to the scientists and engineers working at the AI Security Institute today.
The AI Security Institute is a brilliant part of the British state, bringing together over a hundred exceptional technical experts to understand these systems and how they behave.
Many of these people could earn far more elsewhere. Instead, they have chosen to put their talents to work keeping our country safe. We should be enormously proud of them. And I want to personally thank them for all the work they have done and I know will continue to do.
That is why, over the last few weeks, we’ve been working closely with the US government, the labs - from His Majesty’s gathering of leading AI developers at Dumfries House in Scotland to discussions at the United Nations General Assembly in New York - to retain access for Britain’s AI Security Institute to the most powerful AI models before they are released. And I can confirm that AI scientists at the AI Security Institute are now conducting rigorous evaluations of the latest generation of models, including Gemini 4 Argon to identify risks early, to test robust safeguards, to help keep people safe.
Of course, I know that understanding of these systems must look ahead, not just look back. It means finding new ways to verify and discern capabilities. One avenue is hardware-enabled verification, drawing on Britain’s expertise in semiconductor design. This is early research, but I am determined that Britain will lead it.
Bringing these together, both our existing expertise in the testing of models, new prospective capabilities in verification, Britain’s unparalleled position of understanding will be the foundation on which our AI security will be built.
Now understanding risks is essential. But we must also make Britain harder to attack, and better prepared when AI systems behave unexpectedly.
Take a look at what happened in Australia just earlier this year.
An OpenAI agent went looking for information about public spending on medicines. It arrived on a government website where restrictions were placed on what it could access, so it found another way in.
Its task was benign, legitimate, but without being asked to do so, the agent gained access to information that it was not authorised to have.
The Australian government has said that no personal medical records are known to have been accessed, and there is no evidence of wider compromise.
But the incident should concern us. It concerns me.
It seems likely, if not inevitable, that our own cyber defences will be breached.
Our National Cyber Security Centre has warned that AI will almost certainly make elements of cyber intrusion more effective and efficient.
So my colleague, Dan Jarvis, the Security Minister, will be leading a cross government program to strengthen our defences against cyber attacks, including from AI.
We published the Government Cyber Action Plan earlier this year addressing these concerns. And soon, we will be launching the National Cyber Action Plan.
But if AI gives those who could attack Britain new capabilities, significant new capabilities, we must use the same technology to make Britain harder to attack.
So today I am sharing findings of work already underway to do that.
Across two government pilots, frontier AI has helped identify and address more than a thousand vulnerabilities, alongside other threats to our public services.
Our central vulnerability-monitoring service has already helped reduce the time taken to fix identified weaknesses from 50 days to just eight.
Built on these advances, I want us to go further.
And so today, I am announcing that the DCMS Cyber Minister, the Security Minister and I will lead the urgent use of frontier AI capabilities to find weaknesses within Government systems before attackers exploit them, protect essential government systems and respond more effectively to emerging threats.
I want Britain to become one of the hardest countries in the world to attack using artificial intelligence.
Wherever stronger defences will need stronger legislative support, we will secure it.
The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill gives us an opportunity to do precisely that.
We will work with Parliament and technical experts to assess how we can strengthen the regime to better protect Britain for AI-driven cyber threats and loss-of-control risks.
That includes identifying and reporting on serious incidents and near misses, including reducing AI-driven risk across essential services, and ensuring serious AI incidents can be properly reviewed.
Beyond defence, we will also prepare Britain to respond to incidents.
As AI systems are used more widely, with less human oversight, incidents like the one in Australia will become more likely. And their effects could spread across systems faster than anyone could trace them.
When that happens, government must be able to establish quickly what an agent was asked to do, what it accessed, why it acted as it did and whether the same failure could occur elsewhere.
That is specialist work, it needs expertise that the state has not needed before.
So we are taking the first step.
Working with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the National Cyber Security Centre and the AI Security Institute, we will now develop robust ways for government to respond to agentic AI incidents: looking in particular at how incidents can be contained, and how those affected can be supported.
Early factory laws mattered because Parliament was prepared to establish institutions capable of enforcing them.
Our responsibility today is no different.
As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, Britain must become more capable at protecting its people.
Now that task cannot be carried by government alone.
I want cybersecurity discussed in every boardroom in Britain, rather than simply delegated to middle management.
And to the companies developing the world’s most powerful AI systems, my message is: Listen when your scientists warn of severe dangers. Investigate unexpected behaviours. And if you can’t adequately control the risks, do not release the system.
I want the labs to be honest. And in turn, Britain, too, must be honest about its position.
Much of the technology that will shape our economy, our public services, our national security is being developed outside this country.
In the last technological revolution, Britain became increasingly dependent on technologies developed and controlled elsewhere.
That is now a question of national security, also a question of democratic power. If the British state cannot exercise meaningful control over the technologies on which our country depends, neither can the people that it represents.
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Harold Wilson understood that the scientific revolution demanded new institutions. His government helped establish the Open University, widening access to education.
In 1978, James Callaghan’s government backed Inmos with £50 million of public investment. Its pioneering work in Bristol and Newport helped establish an industrial legacy that remains important to South Wales’s semiconductor industry.
When I visited that cluster, I saw young people, including brilliant women undertaking advanced engineering apprenticeships, developing the skills to build the next generation of technology.
Britain’s early leadership in personal computing helped give rise to Arm, now one of the world’s most important semiconductor design companies.
The bitter lesson of the past is that an early lead in technology is not the same as retaining the power to shape its future.
And so I come to my final theme.
Yes, we will convene countries to keep Britain safe.
Yes, we will test models to keep the British public safe.
Yes, we will harden our defences to keep the British public safe.
But, most crucially, we will - and we must - build in Britain to keep the public safe in Britain.
That is why we are backing British capability through our Sovereign AI programme and through our AI Hardware Plan.
We want the world’s leading companies investing here, but we will not accept dependence as the price of that investment.
Nor should we build infrastructure simply because a company wants it. We must be clear about what Britain needs and what our people receive in return.
The British national interest will be and must be our guiding principle.
And so this brings me to the political tradition that brought me into public life.
[POLITICAL] historic task has been to guide Britain through profound economic change, defending human dignity, widening opportunity,giving people greater security.
Those values remain fundamental. But I believe the age of artificial intelligence demands another.
The power of working people to influence how technology changes their jobs. Of citizens to challenge decisions affecting their lives. Of democratic government to determine the country’s future.
I will not accept a future in which Britain depends on technologies it cannot understand or control, while working people bear the costs of progress they had no power to shape.
Britain must have the power to build its own future. And the British people must have the power to shape it.
That is the central responsibility of the government. And it is one I am determined we will meet, with the defining principle of our approach: we must build machines that serve us.