Is there any area of public policy which Keir Starmer’s government has got right? ‘Where very little is working, AI is a bright spot,’ says a former adviser. ‘They’ve started well but they are now in danger of blowing it.’

When Labour came to power they consigned much of the past 14 years of Tory rule to the dustbin. But Starmer poured resources into Rishi Sunak’s AI Security Institute and published an AI Opportunities action plan in January last year, declaring (very un-Starmerishly) that he wanted to ‘mainline AI into the veins’ of the economy. Last week an audit found that 75 per cent of the proposals had already been delivered – a level of success rare in Whitehall.

‘A government that really believed AGI was set to arrive would be treating it like a national emergency’

Plans to use AI to boost productivity in the public services ‘are the last credible part of Labour’s growth plan’, observes a former Tory cabinet minister. In Downing Street, Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff, is a zealot, telling friends that AI will make ‘the least productive person more productive by 2030 than the most productive person now’. Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, is regarded as one of the best junior ministers in government. Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, who had a difficult time at welfare, now boasts she is running ‘the growth department’.

Last week, Labour announced a fifth AI growth zone, this time in Scotland with £8.2 billion of private investment in data centres, half a billion for local communities and 3,400jobs. The other four growth zones total £28 billion in private investment and 15,000 jobs.

Kendall’s predecessor Peter Kyle has predicted the advent of ‘AGI’, artificial general intelligence, where AI models outstrip humans in every area, before the 2029 election. The problem is that the tech firms at the frontier of AI development now predict AGI within two years, and in the race to exploit the technology Britain is being left behind.

At a recent dinner attended by a minister and Labour strategists, an American guest warned that Britain must develop its own sovereign AI capability or risk key technology being ‘turned off’ in a crisis. In the wake of Donald Trump’s threats to Greenland, the former MI6 chief Alex Younger was asked how the UK could get leverage over Trump or Xi Jinping’s China. He replied: ‘Twenty global-scale technology companies in Europe and the UK.’

Henry de Zoete, senior adviser at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative and a former No. 10 adviser on AI, says: ‘The government deserves credit for making genuine strides on AI. We are the world’s no. 3 AI power. We........

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