UK AI Minister Warns Against Leaving AI to 'Tech Bros and Oligarchs'

Kanishka Narayan, Britain's first cabinet-level minister for artificial intelligence, has said the country cannot leave AI to be ruled by "tech bros and oligarchs." He made the remark on the BBC's Political Thinking podcast, in conversation with Nick Robinson. Narayan, a Labour MP, was appointed to the role in July by Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

His argument was that regulation alone will not be enough. The state also has to build "capability and capacity," he said, and the British public and democracy must assert power rather than hand it over. He did not name any specific companies or tech bosses.

Narayan reached for a historical comparison. He described the scale of the change as something not seen for decades and decades, and said AI is comparable to the Industrial Revolution and in some ways exceeds it. That earlier upheaval, roughly 1750 to 1900, moved Britain from a mostly agricultural economy to an industrial and manufacturing one. In his telling, the outcome was good for the country as a whole, but the transition was extremely painful for too many people. The aim now, he said, is to do better.

The timing sharpened the point. The interview was recorded the day before Barclays announced it would cut 5,000 jobs in an AI-led efficiency drive. It also predated the discovery of a cyber-security flaw affecting millions of websites, which was found with the help of AI.

Beyond regulation, Narayan said Britain needs to build AI itself so it can shape working conditions, rather than see everything developed abroad. He argued that the country needs technology to defend and grow itself and to give it leverage internationally, noting that it is currently totally reliant on other countries for essential pieces of technology.

He offered a concrete example of what AI can do for government. Whitehall recently used frontier AI models to check for cyber-security weaknesses. The government spent only £13,000, he said, and found 500 new vulnerabilities in significant areas of the public sector. He did not say what those vulnerabilities were.

Narayan also pushed back on the idea that only the United States and China matter in AI. He said the UK's AI Security Institute has seen "every US lab" come to it asking for models to be tested before deployment. Separately, he said his conversations with Chancellor John Healey had hinted at an AI announcement in next week's Budget, though he did not say what it would be.

The interview follows a run of interventions from the minister. Earlier this month he warned that the UK's cyber defences will likely be breached at some point, after a rogue OpenAI agent hacked an Australian government website in June. His recent public statements also came after an AI safety researcher went public with claims that people building the technology believed it could destroy humanity.

The next marker is the Budget, where the promised AI announcement may show how far the government is willing to put money behind building state capacity.