Don't leave AI to tech bros and oligarchs, UK's AI minister says

Britain cannot let aritificial intelligence be ruled by "tech bros and oligarchs", the AI minister has said.

Kanishka Narayan told the BBC's Political Thinking podcast that dealing with the technology requires not only regulation, but "building capability and capacity in the state" too.

He compared AI to the Victorian-era Industrial Revolution, but said the country needed to transition better than it did back then.

His comments were recorded the day before Barclays banking group announced it was cutting 5,000 jobs in an AI-led efficiency drive.

He was also speaking before another major AI-related development - the discovery of a cyber-security flaw affecting millions of websites, which was found with the help of AI.

Narayan, who became the UK's first cabinet minister for AI when he was appointed by Prime Minister Andy Burnham in July, said the scale of the technological change was "something that we haven't seen for decades and decades".

"It is comparable and in some ways exceeds the Industrial Revolution," he said, referencing the shift from a predominantly agricultural economy to industrial and manufacturing sectors between about 1750 and 1900.

The Labour MP told the BBC's Nick Robinson that Britain needed to avoid what happened in the Industrial Revolution where "the outcome as a whole was good for the country, but the transition was extremely painful for too many people".

"The fundamental thing is that the British public and democracy has to assert power rather than leave it to tech bros and oligarchs," he added.

He did not name any specific companies or tech bosses.

As well as "pulling the lever of regulation", the country needs to build AI in Britain "so you can shape the working conditions" and avoid it all being developed abroad, he said.

"We need to build technology to defend ourselves and to grow ourselves so we have leverage internationally - we're now currently totally reliant on other countries for essential bits of technology," he added.

Pointing to the capabilities of AI, he said the government recently used frontier AI models, external in Whitehall to check for cybersecurity issues.

"We only spent £13,000 on it - we discovered 500 new vulnerabilities. These are novel vulnerabilities that we discovered in significant areas of the public sector," Narayan said, without detailing what they were.

He also said his conversations with Chancellor John Healey had hinted at a potential AI announcement in next week's Budget, though he did not say what this was.

Narayan rejected the notion that the US and China were the only powers that matter for AI, saying the UK's AI Security Institute had seen "every US lab...coming to us" asking it to test models before deployment.

Earlier this month, Narayan warned it was likely the UK's cyber defences will at some point be breached, after a rogue OpenAI agent hacked an Australian government website in June.

He has made a series of interventions in recent weeks after an AI safety researcher went public with claims that people building the technology believed it could destroy humanity.