UK to invest £130 million in AI cyber defense

The UK government announced an AI package of more than £600 million, including £130 million for AI cyber defense, with plans to deploy autonomous agents to find critical infrastructure vulnerabilities before attackers do. £60 million is for a national cyber shield, including a £25 million enterprise challenge fund and a regulatory sandbox for autonomous tools; £70 million establishes a NERV center to use AI to detect weak points in UK infrastructure and the economy. According to The Register, the autonomous permissions and launch timing of these agents remain unclear. The announcement came days after the PHP2Shell incident, in which a critical PHP vulnerability took dozens of government websites offline and the UK National Cyber Security Centre had coordinated disclosure with OpenAI. The plan also adds £120 million to the AI Safety Institute (AISI) and establishes a £165 million AI biosecurity initiative, including what the government calls the world's first dedicated AI biosecurity laboratory, with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind all participating.