The government has put a price on its plan for artificial intelligence. Ahead of Wednesday's Budget, the Chancellor, John Healey, has announced a package of AI spending that the industry body techUK puts at more than £600m. By our count, the individual measures add up to just over £620m, plus £10m a year for research into how AI will change jobs.
The headline item is a new AI Biosecurity Lab, which the government calls the "world's first dedicated AI biosecurity organisation". But the package also gives more money to the AI Security Institute, funds AI-powered cyber defences, and, of most interest to this site, widens the government's Sovereign AI Fund to back British companies working on robotics and what it calls physical and industrial AI.
A £100m lab, with £200m from OpenAI and Anthropic
The AI Biosecurity Lab, or AIBL, will get £100m of public money. It will use frontier AI to spot biological threats earlier and to speed up the development and testing of vaccines, treatments and other medical countermeasures. A further £65m will go on bio-surveillance and countermeasures for priority pathogens, making £165m for what the government calls a National AI Biosecurity Initiative.
Two of the biggest American AI labs are backing it. According to the Cabinet Office, OpenAI will provide £100m in compute and model credits, along with trusted access to its most capable relevant models through its Rosalind Biodefense programme. Anthropic will provide up to £100m in model credits, trusted model access and technical support. Google DeepMind will collaborate on research and look to provide trusted access to Gemini and specialised science models, and the London AI life sciences company Basecamp Research will give access to its AI biology models.
It is worth being clear about what that £200m is. It is credit to use the companies' own AI systems, not cash, and the government describes it as "up to" £200m in company commitments. The lab will run as an independent non-profit, modelled loosely on the AI Security Institute, and will work alongside the UK Health Security Agency, the Animal and Plant Health Agency, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the medicines regulator, the MHRA. Details of its scientific advisory committee are still to come.
"Our new AI Biosecurity Lab will be a major new global institution, bringing together world-leading scientific expertise to protect people from emerging biological threats," said the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan. Aurelia Nguyen, deputy chief executive of the vaccine coalition CEPI, said rapid advances in AI were "creating new risks related to the design and modification of pathogens", but that the same technology could help "detect threats earlier and design lifesaving vaccines faster".
More money for AI safety and cyber defence
The AI Security Institute, set up in 2023 to evaluate the risks of the most advanced models, gets an extra £120m. The timing is pointed. The institute has just published its own investigation into an AI model that carried on attacking a target during a security test, and, according to Anthropic, it has decided to run its evaluations without internet access, as we report in our story on OpenAI cutting its models off from the web.
On cyber security, £60m goes to a "National Cyber Shield" that will use agentic AI, meaning AI systems that take actions rather than just answer questions, to strengthen the UK's defences. That includes a £25m challenge fund for British AI and cyber security firms and scoping work on a regulatory sandbox for deploying these tools across critical national infrastructure. A further £70m will set up a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre to hunt for weaknesses across critical infrastructure and the wider economy, and the National Cyber Security Centre will open an AI Cyber Security Centre of Excellence in Manchester.
Ciaran Martin, the former head of the NCSC, called it "a really welcome package at a critical time for our cyber defences", adding that "this week we've had a stark reminder that AI exposes some of our digital world's weaknesses". That is a reference to the PHP flaws found with AI tools, which led the UK government, among others, to take some sites offline.
What's in it for British robotics firms
For readers interested in robots rather than chatbots, the most significant line may be a short one. The Sovereign AI Fund, which invests directly in promising UK AI companies, gets an extra £60m and will expand into "a new focus area of Physical and Industrial AI", building on what the government calls Britain's strengths in robotics, autonomous systems and advanced manufacturing. Another £60m goes to Sovereign AI's research and development procurement scheme, which buys innovative solutions for problems in health and care and in AI security.
That matters because the UK's problem in robotics has rarely been ideas. As we found in our look at Britain's place in the humanoid race, British firms are strong on dexterous hands and AI, but scaling up and staying British is harder. A fund that can invest directly is one answer. At £60m it is small next to the sums now flowing into US and Chinese robotics start-ups, but it adds to the £40m for robotics adoption hubs announced earlier this month.
The package also includes £18m for a new UK Advanced Chip Design Academy, investment in AI chip design capability in Edinburgh, £15m for an AI Challenge Prize whose first round targets health, an extra £23m over three years for the AI Economics Institute, and £30m for local AI partnerships led by mayoral authorities to help councils and small businesses adopt AI.
The UK angle
This is, in part, a response to the warning from the government's own science advisers that Britain risks becoming an AI customer rather than a builder. Mr Narayan was explicit: "We cannot afford to rely entirely on technology built overseas." Yet the flagship biosecurity lab depends heavily on credits from two American companies, which shows how hard real independence will be.
The jobs research is a nod to public anxiety about AI. "I understand and share the concerns of working people," the Chancellor said, promising "a distinctively British approach to AI" that "doesn't leave workers behind". Julian David, techUK's chief executive, said the funding "helps British AI firms grow here, not abroad".
For UK businesses the practical openings are the £25m cyber challenge fund, the Sovereign AI Fund's new robotics focus, the procurement scheme and the local AI partnerships. None has published application details yet.
What happens next
The measures will be confirmed in the Budget on Wednesday, when the wider spending picture will show whether this is new money or reallocated money. Then the detail matters: who leads the biosecurity lab and where it is based, how the Sovereign AI Fund defines "physical and industrial AI", and how quickly any of it reaches companies. We will follow it up as those details emerge.