The announcement follows a series of incidents involving AI agents across major firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic acting outside human control and hacking into external systems.
On 9 September, Evan Hubinger, a top safety researcher at Anthropic, warned in a post on X that AI is advancing so quickly he believed there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade.
The bosses of the US-based AI giants such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind have all backed the idea of an AI development slowdown.
However, there are currently no global safety rules in place to regulate the companies and their technology. President Trump has called for the sector to regulate itself so that US firms do not lose out to Chinese rivals.
Speaking to the BBC following the announcement, Narayan said the UK needed “to be confident… as a country” when questioned as to how the government can make foreign AI firms abide by UK rules.
“We have the capability, we have the trust, and we have a government that is right on the side of the British public in making sure we don’t just have laws but the ability to enforce those laws,” he said.
“What we are focused on is delivering the right outcome for the British public, where the law was the answer.”
On the question of whether the UK should have its own sovereign AI frontier model, the minister said he was “focused” on securing British sovereignty, which meant “placing the right set of investments”.
“It’s British chips being made here. It’s British models outside of just language, looking at things like drug discovery, materials discovery, computer vision and its areas of adoption, including AI, security and cyber-security,” he said.
