UK tech bosses urge Burnham to spend £20 billion on sovereign AI
Key Points
- Tech executives across the UK have signed an open letter to the government on building out sovereign AI capabilities.
- The letter, headed by British AI lab Cosine, urges the government to spend more than £20 billion over the next five years on sovereign AI.
- It argues that if Britain does not ensure its AI sovereignty, it may be left with critical AI-powered infrastructure that is controlled entirely elsewhere.
Technology executives from across the United Kingdom have published an open letter to the government urging it to spend more than £20 billion on building sovereign AI capabilities.
The open letter, published by British sovereign AI lab Cosine, has been signed by senior figures across the British technology sector, including BT, Telefonica Tech UK, Sopra Steria, PA Consulting, Xcelo, and many more.
Sovereign AI refers to the ability for the United Kingdom to govern, deploy, and manage strategically important AI capabilities rather than relying on systems controlled by and within other countries.
The open letter highlights the risk of weaving AI into critical national infrastructure while that technology’s capabilities are controlled overseas, noting that this risks Britain’s infrastructure becoming dependent on decisions made elsewhere.
A striking example of the risks of AI dependency was seen earlier this year, when US President Donald Trump temporarily forced Anthropic to bar anyone except US nationals from using its Mythos-class Claude models. As Anthropic did not have the capabilities to implement this ban, it subsequently revoked access to the models for all users.
This highlighted the control wielded by the United States over its frontier AI models, and has acted as a warning for many in Britain and other countries that if they build critical systems based on these models, they will be subject to decisions made by the governments that control them.
“This is not a case for technological isolation,” Cosine CEO Alistair Pullen said.
“The UK should remain closely engaged with allies, open markets and international standards, while retaining domestic capability where dependence would create a material national risk.”
The open letter calls on the government to use planning reform, energy policy, and other levers to make the UK a competitive place to test, train, and deploy secure strategic AI systems.
It said that Britain needed to spend more than £20 billion over the next five years to build out compute, power, data centre capacity, and network infrastructure to secure its AI sovereignty.
The letter also said government should not rely on any single model or AI provider for critical public infrastructure and should have mandated fallbacks to reduce dependence on a single centralised power.
“Britain is coming from a position of strength. It has world-class research, deep software talent, strong cyber capability, credible institutions, strong digital infrastructure, and real advantages in science, defence, and public services,” Pullen said.
“But without a plan for AI sovereignty, the UK risks becoming a customer in the most important technological shift of this era rather than a serious builder.”
