AI Minister sets out plans to build Britain’s AI resilience at WestTech London’s Base One
The Rt Hon Kanishka Narayan MP, Minister for Artificial Intelligence, gave a key speech on building Britain’s AI resilience today at Base One, WestTech London’s newest deep tech innovation space.
At the Imperial College London event, the Minister set out a suite of new measures to better protect Britain from the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems. The government will put frontier AI to work strengthening the UK’s cyber defences, building on two pilots that have already helped find and fix more than a thousand potential vulnerabilities across government systems. It will also examine stronger legal protections and prepare for serious incidents involving autonomous AI systems.
The Minister’s ambition is for Britain to become “one of the hardest countries in the world to attack using artificial intelligence.”
It was fitting to hear this message at Base One, which sits at the heart of WestTech London’s Old Oak Innovation Cluster, where deep tech companies are scaling the technologies that will shape this future.
As Imperial College London Provost Professor Peter Haynes remarked, the focus is on “ensuring that frontier AI is developed and deployed safely and responsibly, with governance, safeguards and real-world impact embedded from the outset.”
Across WestTech London, that work is already underway. A new Academic Building at White City Deep Tech Campus in White City Innovation District will bring researchers together at unprecedented scale for data science, AI and machine learning. A new Centre for AI-Driven Innovation, established jointly with the World Economic Forum and supported by the UK government, is the first WEF Global Centre in the UK. Imperial’s School of Convergence Science has a major focus on Human and Artificial Intelligence, shaping a responsible, collaborative AI landscape that amplifies human creativity, intelligence and societal impact while keeping people empowered. The new landmark Frontier AI Lab with Thomson Reuters is focused on AI safety, reliability and its societal and economic impact.
Read more about the visit on the Imperial College London website.
Pictured, left to right: Imperial’s Chief of Staff to the President, Amanda Wolthuizen; the Rt Hon Kanishka Narayan MP; and Imperial Provost and Deputy President Professor Peter Haynes.
