UK announces £600 million AI safety package covering cyber and biological threats

On October 24, ahead of the budget announcement, the UK government announced an AI safety investment plan totaling more than £600 million, covering cyber defense, biosecurity and AI safety testing. The largest safety-specific item is a £165 million national AI biosecurity program, of which £100 million will build an AI biosecurity laboratory and £65 million will be used for biosurveillance and response to priority pathogens; OpenAI and Anthropic committed up to £200 million in model access and compute credits, and Google DeepMind and Basecamp Research are participating in research collaborations. The AI Security Institute received an additional £120 million to expand evaluation of frontier models and help develop technical standards. A further £60 million will build a national cyber shield using agentic AI (including a £25 million challenge fund), and £70 million will establish a vulnerability discovery center, NERV; the government says existing AI-assisted pilots have already found and addressed more than 1,000 vulnerabilities.