UK invests £130 million to deploy AI cyber defense; AI vulnerability hunters to take up posts

The UK government announced an investment of £130 million for AI-driven cyber defense, including deploying autonomous AI agents in critical infrastructure to find security vulnerabilities in advance; this funding is part of a more than £600 million AI spending plan announced by the UK Treasury ahead of the budget. Of this, £60 million is for the "National Cyber Shield," including a £25 million challenge fund for UK cybersecurity companies, and there are plans to establish a regulatory sandbox to test autonomous security tools; £70 million is for establishing the National Exposure and Real-time Vulnerability Centre (NERV). This comes after the PHP2Shell vulnerability incident took dozens of government websites offline for several days; the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) coordinated vulnerability disclosure with OpenAI, and UK AI Minister Narayan said the technology had already found 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities in important parts of the public sector.