UK government announces $800 million in AI safety funding
UK government sets out $800 million for AI security funding
The UK government announced on Saturday approximately £600 million ($800 million) in funding, mainly to defend against health and safety threats posed by artificial intelligence. The largest share goes to a new biosecurity program, including £100 million to build laboratories that use AI to detect biological threats and £65 million to develop pathogen countermeasures; AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said the goal is to make the AI Biosecurity Lab an important institution that brings together global scientific expertise and protects the public from emerging biological threats. OpenAI and Anthropic will provide up to £200 million in model credits to the program, with Google DeepMind and Basecamp Research providing other support. The UK government will also add £120 million to the existing AI Security Institute, and a further £130 million for critical infrastructure cyber defense projects such as the National Cyber Shield.
The bulk of the UK's roughly 600 million pounds in security funding goes to biosecurity and cyber defense, which can be used to understand the structure of the government's AI safety spending and how vendors participate.