Treasury to Fund World-First AI Biosecurity Lab With £100m
The chancellor will put £100m into a new AI Biosecurity Lab, within a £165m biosecurity initiative, alongside up to £200m of model credits and computing power pledged by OpenAI and Anthropic. It is the first substantial Budget announcement to be made on the record. The Budget is on Wednesday.
The distinction between those two sums matters and is easily garbled: £100m is government cash, while the £200m is in-kind credits from two private companies, so the “up to £300m” figure in circulation is arithmetically right but blurs the two. The laboratory will be an independent non-profit modelled on the AI Security Institute, working with the health and animal health agencies, the defence laboratory and the medicines regulator, with Google DeepMind and Basecamp Research as partners. No location and no timetable have been published. Around it sits a wider package: another £120m for the AI Security Institute, a £60m national cyber shield including a £25m challenge fund, a £70m vulnerability centre, £60m more for the sovereign AI fund, chip design capability in Edinburgh and two centres of excellence in Manchester. John Healey said he was setting out “a distinctively British approach to AI — one that doesn’t leave workers behind and defends our national interest”, and the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, was blunter about the reasoning: “We cannot afford to rely entirely on technology built overseas.”