‘Andy Burnham needs a ‘sovereign and safe AI’ policy’

AI policy might not pass the crudest version of the Makerfield test; I doubt Burnham’s constituents were losing sleep over access to Fable 5. But Burnham’s platform is built on the principle that decisions shaping people’s lives shouldn’t be made by distant interests. The future of the most important technology of our age is being built elsewhere, and Britain’s security and prosperity rest on our ability to shape it.

Britain is exposed. On our current course, we will neither reap the rewards of AI nor be safeguarded against its most catastrophic risks. Without a frontier lab, we need another route to keep our seat at the table. The answer is leverage: build the compute, innovation ecosystem, and safety capability that make Britain valuable, then use our standing to secure binding safeguards against the worst risks. ‘Sovereign AI’ is trendy right now; but what Labour needs is a ‘Sovereign and Safe’ AI platform.

Britain must become valuable in the frontier supply chain. Frontier labs operate from the US and China, and we risk them writing rules we have no leverage to enforce. We build leverage by owning more of the physical inputs frontier AI depends on, particularly compute (the industrial-scale processing power, housed in data centres, that AI models are built on and run on). We should prioritise inference compute, the layer businesses and public services run on day-to-day. Britain needs the security of knowing the tech that powers our hospitals can’t be switched off from Washington at six hours’ notice.

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But it is 4 times cheaper to build a data centre in the US than the UK: our energy and planning policy is holding Britain back. The next Labour government must change that. 

Strategically important projects should connect to the grid faster. Research shows that delays matter more than energy prices in compute build-out — a one-year delay costs a 100MW data centre more than $500mn. We should allow flexible connection, letting data centres bypass the queue in exchange for reducing demand when the grid is under stress, and auction fast-track slots so the most valuable projects move first. 

We should implement the Fingleton Review across the entire economy, as the Labour Government pledged, and use central government powers to override local objection where valuable infrastructure is at stake. We need cheap, abundant power, which means backing nuclear and opening North Sea oil and gas licences. And we should champion the build-out for what it is: a jobs programme. Data centres deliver construction, engineering and high-value operations jobs to the regions that host them, often former Labour strongholds. We should rebrand them AI Factories to reflect that. To ensure residents feel a stake in them, the skills pipeline for electrical engineers, grid engineers, and technicians should sit at the heart of implementing the Milburn Review. And all of this should be delivered by a publicly accountable Office for Infrastructure with a specific compute brief.

Britain also needs to adopt AI. We should take projections of US and Chinese GDP seriously — our national security depends on staying within reach. And diffusion benefits ordinary people: a strong economy with high-value jobs, better public services, radical progress in health and science. Britain should become the most attractive place outside the US for frontier labs. Court an expanded Anthropic presence and do everything to keep DeepMind here: the more labs rely on the British market, the harder it will be to cut off British users.

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Britain’s edge lies in scientific R&D and agent applications. We should lean into our strengths rather than pursuing our own frontier model. That means backing British innovators with scale-up capital so they don’t move to the US, pushing pension funds to deliver on Mansion House reforms, and backing SovereignAI, the government’s VC fund. Burnham should target devolution to unlock our innovation ecosystems through Designated Areas of Research Excellence (DARE) zones, with targeted tax incentives and fast-tracked visas to attract global talent and accelerate British innovation. This is how we keep jobs and IP here. 

None of this works without our strongest asset. UK AISI is world-leading, and our evaluation and red-teaming expertise is the main reason we get a seat at the table. But AISI lacks a legislated remit and an independent, multi-year budget; it should have both, plus additional compute funding to carry out long-horizon research. And we must protect AISI’s access to frontier models. Export controls on Mythos and GPT 5.6 exposed our vulnerability, and OpenAI is pushing for a US evaluation body with mandatory first access. If that happens, AISI’s privileged access could quietly disappear, with Britain’s global standing following it out the door.

Britain should convene the middle powers who hold supply chain chokepoints, from Dutch lithography to Korean hardware, and use our collective weight to win binding international red lines against the worst risks: bioweapons, autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. This is the purpose of the whole platform: we build leverage to protect national security.

Finally, we should regulate frontier AI. Regulation has overwhelming public support, and Labour won a mandate for it in the 2024 manifesto. A light-touch approach regulating the most advanced models makes aggressive adoption defensible. When technology is reshaping British society, our ministers need stronger tools to deal with Silicon Valley execs than complaining on social media.

Makerfield residents will know if Britain falls behind on AI. They’ll notice if we spend a decade arguing over the community benefits of data centres, only for Washington to switch off the tech that keeps our hospitals running. And they’ll know if the worst biorisks materialise. Labour should champion a Sovereign and Safe AI platform to entrench Britain’s seat at the table, before our future is shaped elsewhere.

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