Sir Keir Starmer has warned Britain must not bury its head in the sand over artificial intelligence, calling the technology a defining force for the UK economy.
The Prime Minister used his keynote address at London Tech Week to lay out a three-option framework for how Britain could respond to the global AI revolution.
“On artificial intelligence, Britain has three options. One, we could stick our head in the sand, pretend it isn’t happening and hope for the best. I won’t accept that,” Starmer told the conference.
He dismissed a second path of removing regulatory guardrails entirely, before arguing for a third approach centred on backing British businesses building jobs and technologies for the future.
London Tech Week is Europe’s biggest technology conference, and this year’s event opened against a backdrop of renewed optimism about the UK’s standing in the global tech ecosystem.
London reclaimed the top spot from Paris in Dealroom’s latest global tech ecosystem rankings, with startups in the capital attracting $17.7bn of investment last year as AI funding almost doubled.
Starmer repeatedly stressed technological sovereignty, saying Britain must create the right conditions for firms to “start here, scale here and stay here” rather than relocating abroad.
Central to the government’s announcements was a new sovereign compute strategy, including plans to purchase around £400m worth of specialist AI chips and expand domestic computing infrastructure.
The government said the investment would build national AI capability and support British startups seeking access to high-performance compute resources currently dominated by overseas providers.
London-based AI firm Cosine, selected under the government’s Sovereign AI programme, announced it had assembled a coalition of major British institutions to develop Lumen Sovereign, described as Britain’s first sovereign frontier AI model.
BT, HSBC, BAE Systems, Babcock, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest, LSEG, PwC, Thales UK, Leonardo UK and Telefónica Tech UK&I have all signed agreements to participate in the model’s design phase.
Tech secretary Liz Kendall announced a £20m Early Careers Jobs Alliance bringing together government and employers to examine how AI is reshaping entry-level work across the economy.
The government will also expand its Techfirst programme, with 400,000 pupils from disadvantaged schools set to receive dedicated AI and technology training.
New AI bootcamps will launch in Greater Manchester and Lancashire this summer before a wider national rollout across the country gathers momentum.
Starmer revealed that 1.7 million workers have already received AI training since the launch of the government’s wider upskilling drive, signalling the scale of the programme so far.
“We can’t know exactly where AI will cause disruption,” he said. “But we can know how we will respond.”
The Prime Minister pointed to Britain’s position as the world’s third-largest technology economy and said startups had attracted almost half of all European tech investment this year.
“Britain has every reason to be confident,” he said. “But the real question is whether we shape this change or allow it to shape us.”