Technology and Scienceupdated 52m ago2 min read
UK Government Establishes National AI Biosecurity Lab With £100m Budget, OpenAI And Anthropic Credits
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UK to establish a national AI Biosecurity Lab with £100 million public funding. OpenAI and Anthropic pledge up to £200 million in model credits and compute.
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£100m AIBL announced
The UK government said it will establish a national AI Biosecurity Lab, committing £100m to the new institute described as a "world first" as part of Wednesday's Budget. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said the lab would be a "major new global institution" that brings together "world-leading scientific expertise" to help the UK safeguard its citizens and goals as AI develops. Chancellor John Healey said, "AI will transform daily life: every firm, community, hospital, school, and every aspect of our economy can benefit," while pledging a "distinctively British approach to AI" that does not leave workers behind.
The plan also includes £120m for the UK's AI Security Institute, which evaluates the risks of the most advanced and powerful models and was established by the former Conservative government in 2023. The government said OpenAI and Anthropic will provide £200m worth of AI model credits that can be spent on the use of their models, alongside a £60m investment in a "National Cyber Shield" and £70m for a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre.
From PHP flaws to guardrails
The UK government said it was among organisations that took some sites offline as a precaution after critical flaws were surfaced in PHP, a popular server-side scripting language used in web development for decades. Researchers who helped surface the vulnerabilities in PHP warned platforms which use it could be exposed to potential hacks, and the flaw was coined php2shell. There have been no reports of any successful exploits of the flaw, coined php2shell, so far, while experts warned the incident showed how quickly dormant bugs could be surfaced and potentially exploited using AI.
The £600m package would defend the public against threats to health and security from artificial intelligence, with the biggest chunk going to a new biosecurity initiative. Jordan Cummins, a director at the CBI, said, "The Chancellor is right to put security, resilience and trust at the heart of the UK's approach to AI."
Who gets funded, and how
The UK plan described by Sky News includes £130m for new projects to improve cyber defences for critical infrastructure and the wider economy, known as the National Cyber Shield and the National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability Centre. £60m would go to a fund investing in British companies using AI to advance robotics, autonomous systems and manufacturing, and £60m would also be used for AI research and procurement contracts. An extra £23 million would go to research on the economic impact of AI, £18m would go to a new chip design academy, and £15m would fund a prize for AI solutions to public policy problems, initially focused on healthcare.
Regional mayors would receive £30m to support local AI work, and Britain's National Cyber Security Centre would receive an unspecified sum to expand in Manchester. The BBC said the AI Biosecurity Lab's creation would be supported by leading AI developers, and it added that the full details about the role and remit of the new lab are yet to emerge.