The new AI taskforce should have one mission: leverage

Without leverage, Britain cannot chart its own course in a world transformed by AI

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Background image from the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I

By Callum Coleman and Ed Lawrence

“Nations have a narrow window to decide whether they shape AI or get shaped by it. Britain is in that window right now.” - Kanishka Narayan

Another day, another taskforce. As part of a rejig after disbanding the science and tech department, the Prime Minister has established an “AI Taskforce” chaired by Lord Vallance.

This is good news. Alongside inviting the AI Minister to attend Cabinet, it is a signal that Andy Burnham’s government recognises its approach to AI will be central to its success.

However, we are worried that without the right focus and ambition, we might waste a rare opportunity. A cross-departmental body with political capital from No.10 does not come along often.

Are we worrying about the wrong workers?

There are a myriad of worthy objectives the taskforce could pursue. Some of its energy will rightly go on civil service adoption, where there is plenty of low-hanging fruit. But a taskforce which only succeeds in pushing for Claude to be used a little more around Whitehall will have failed. Adoption is a small part of a much bigger and more urgent challenge: building enough leverage to chart our own course in a world transformed by advanced AI.

Britain’s sovereignty is at stake. Without leverage, Britain will not be able to capture AI’s economic value for the benefit of its citizens, nor keep them safe from weaponised or misaligned AI. Our default is to drift ever deeper into dependence as economic and geopolitical power concentrates in Washington and Beijing; heading for what Anton Leicht calls the permanent periphery.

We therefore propose the taskforce should be centred on a core mission: building the leverage Britain needs to secure guaranteed long-term access to advanced AI by the end of this parliament.

From our own experience working in government and in the innovation policy sphere, we have too often seen AI considered as just another policy area which, with the odd injection of cash and a few warm words, can be left to trundle along.

AI Minister Kanishka Narayan has observed that we have a narrow window to secure sovereignty over our future. The AI Taskforce should be equipped to do so.

What do we need leverage for?

In June, US President Donald Trump abruptly announced export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, forcing the company to deny access to foreign users, including in the UK.

The controls, which Trump justified on national security grounds, restricted British access for three weeks. In practice, Anthropic opted to rescind the model for all its users, including Americans, but the episode illustrated the US’s ultimate authority over the technology. It has given way to a de facto licensing regime, in which access to the most capable models requires Washington’s consent.

Britain can no longer assume access to frontier AI, even as we increasingly rely on it for cyberdefence, critical infrastructure, public services, and military capabilities; not to mention the wealth creation and tax revenue which will increasingly be concentrated in AI-powered sectors.

The answer is not to try to extricate ourselves from frontier AI. There is no question that this technology will give immense strategic advantages to those who utilise it well, leaving behind those who don’t.

And Britain will be exposed to risks, whether we capture the transformative benefits or not. AI built elsewhere still empowers criminals here, still competes with our most valuable industries, still leaves our infrastructure open to attack.

Without aggressively adopting AI ourselves, we are even more vulnerable: our economic and geopolitical standing will wane if we’re left behind by progress in the US and China. The government should keep Reeves’s ambition to make the UK the fastest adopting country in the G7.

Equally, Britain should not resign itself to a world where Washington can withdraw our access to frontier AI at a few hours’ notice. We have serious assets that carry value in an AI-dominated global economy: world-leading technical talent and safety capability; a strong innovation ecosystem to support AI adoption and supply chain footprint; diplomatic weight amongst middle powers; and (some) AI infrastructure.

The generational challenge for this new AI Taskforce is to supercharge our strengths, turning them into leverage. Britain should be a nation whose continued access to AI is in the commercial and strategic interests of both Washington and the frontier labs, and one that is resilient if that access is lost.

The authority to act boldly

The government intends to model its new taskforce on the pandemic-era Vaccine Taskforce. That unit was remarkably successful – across procurement, rollout, and international coordination - and much has been written on the drivers of its success. Perhaps most crucially:

1. It had clear, measurable aims (number of vaccines procured, number of doses delivered within a set timeframe).

2. It was granted sweeping powers. It pulled levers across several government departments, with a ring-fenced budget and fast-tracked ministerial approval process.

3. It was empowered to exercise a high risk appetite. The group operated with venture capital culture, taking swift calculated bets and spending under uncertainty.

This model came out of a crisis, but it has been held up as an effective way to address urgent priorities at speed from inside the government. In fact, there has already been one AI taskforce modelled on the vaccines team: the 2023 Frontier AI Taskforce, led by Ian Hogarth, which became the AI Security Institute (AISI).

To deliver on a similar scale, the government’s new AI taskforce should be backed with structural authority across government: holding powers of direction over departments that bottleneck British AI progress, designating strategically important projects into existing fast-track regimes, and setting objectives the Foreign Office carries into international negotiations on AI.

Learning from the vaccines experience, it should have a ring-fenced budget alongside fast-tracked ministerial approval, and a licence to spend under uncertainty including to attract top talent. Some of the bets won’t pay off, but others will, and a taskforce that sticks to the well-trodden path will not make them.

Infrastructure

The Prime Minister has sensibly framed AI progress as powering “a new industrial revolution that drives good growth in every postcode” (Martha Dacombe sets out this idea here). Compute is the most tangible form of leverage available to Britain. It is also the most visible, in the jobs and physical infrastructure that come with data centres and the supply chain that builds them.

The AI taskforce should set an ambitious target for overall compute build-out, alongside a distinct sovereign inference target. By the end of this Parliament, Britain should have enough capacity under UK legal and operational control to maintain designated critical public, scientific, and national security workloads if access to foreign frontier models is interrupted.

The taskforce should identify qualifying critical infrastructure and translate this into a published compute and power target within its first six months, alongside the existing 6GW target for overall capacity.

American developers are short of sites, power and political tolerance for new data centres. The taskforce should pursue ‘compute for access’ deals with hyperscalers, trading favourable terms for hosting frontier compute here for guaranteed access to frontier AI. If Washington restricts supply again, the labs themselves have capital on British soil and contractual reasons to lobby the US government in our favour.

This will almost certainly generate inter-departmental friction. It should. A taskforce operating from the heart of government should push through trade offs in the national interest. Having seen Lord Vallance coordinate the cross-departmental Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor agenda, we are confident he can do so tactfully.

Alongside capacity, the taskforce should position open-source AI models to act as a fallback for valuable infrastructure if British access to frontier tech is revoked. This could start by ensuring that critical public systems can move between model providers and, where necessary, onto domestically operated alternatives.

Accelerating build-out

We must address key policy bottlenecks to compute build-out. Expensive industrial power costs, limited grid capacity, and lengthy grid connection queues force investors elsewhere. Researchers at the Carnegie Endowment estimate a 100MW data centre is worth 19% less in Britain than America, mostly because grid connection takes ten months longer.

The government has started weeding out speculative applications, but the reforms are stuck in consultation. One of this piece’s co-authors worked in the energy sector and knows they’d welcome some ruthless, mild-mannered efficiency from Lord Vallance. A taskforce whose chair reports directly to the PM could be granted power to make reform happen at pace.

Post Haste: Let’s care for our electrical commons

Britain’s deeper problem — the cost of industrial electricity and the pace at which new generation comes online — needs reform beyond the taskforce’s reach. But the taskforce can clear more immediate bottlenecks if granted powers of direction over the energy and housing ministries.

This could include interventions such as designating data centres into the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) regime to accelerate planning approval, or writing the taskforce’s objectives into Ofgem’s Strategy and Policy Statement to shape national energy policy towards meeting compute targets. Similar levers and fast-tracked approval were indispensable to the Vaccine Taskforce’s success.

Strategic investment in safety capability

Britain’s safety capability is its main strategic leverage. AISI is world-leading, and its technical expertise is why it was one of a handful of organisations given access to Mythos before release. The June export controls then cut AISI off, demonstrating that even privileged evaluation access remains contingent on politics in DC.

The taskforce should identify where Britain’s technical capability could translate into strategic leverage. One opportunity is the verification technology needed to facilitate a future AI development slowdown agreement between the US and China, should one ever be reached. Verification would act as the speed camera for a frontier AI slowdown: each side needs to know whether the other is sticking to agreed limits, rather than secretly training new models or hiding the compute needed to do so. The taskforce could commission scenario planning to identify the exact technology an agreement would require.

This work could be led by AISI – one of the institute’s founding directors, Ollie Ilott, has been appointed to head up the AI taskforce, which should enable close collaboration. The taskforce could then ensure the government procures the most strategically valuable hardware in the verification sector, sending market signals to companies like Sheffield-based Amodo.

The taskforce should also ensure domestic verification businesses are granted access to critical infrastructure to test proof of concept. This could make Britain an indispensable actor should slowdown discussions progress, and position us to lead a growing market.

The taskforce should work across government to cement Britain’s leading technical capability in strategic areas, particularly biosecurity. Expanding AISI’s biolab makes strategic sense. Government and industry both need to understand AI-bio risk, and bio is a key area where the US and China converge on AI safety. If we entrench our expertise, the UK could make a strong case to broker — or at least actively participate in — an agreement. This cross-cutting strategic work is too valuable to leave to individual departments. Technical capability others need is the most durable leverage Britain has.

The way ahead

The next few years will be rocky. AI will continue to transform the world around us while Westminster plays catch-up. One taskforce cannot tackle all of this alone. The politics will get harder as voters form stronger views and populists seek to take advantage. The geopolitics will heat up as economic and political power concentrates in the nations and labs building the most advanced systems.

In this context, we will need all the leverage we can get. The proposals above should be complemented by Britain taking a leading role amongst middle powers. Britain offers a bridge between the US and Europe, and technical talent that allies lack, making us a natural convener of the democracies controlling key AI supply chain chokepoints including the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea. The G20 in 2027, which Britain will host, is one avenue to build that coalition.

The Vaccine Taskforce was set up in a crisis, and it was given the powers, budget and risk appetite to match. AI will not announce itself the same way as the pandemic. But it is the question that will define Britain’s place in the world for a generation, and the decisions that determine our path are being taken now. The new taskforce’s powers and ambition should reflect that.

Ed Lawrence is a former HM Treasury Special Adviser. Callum Coleman is a Public Affairs Manager at the University of Oxford, focused on innovation. They are the authors of Britain’s Narrow Window, a new newsletter about UK AI policy.