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Compare the UK Government’s recent announcements on AI with the US tech industry’s press releases and it can often be hard to tell the difference.
This week the Technology Secretary announced a new ‘partnership’ with OpenAI – a multi-billion dollar tech giant that has aligned itself closely with US President Donald Trump.
“This partnership will support the UK’s goal to build sovereign AI in the UK,” claims Peter Kyle’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Sam Altman’s firm. What it fails to explain is exactly how putting more key digital infrastructure in the hands of a US tech giant will help build the UK’s ‘sovereign’ capacity.
The tech secretary’s announcement is reminiscent of OpenAI’s recent sales pitch: earlier this year, they announced, “OpenAI for Countries, our new global initiative to help interested governments build sovereign AI capability in coordination with the U.S. government”.
But this partnership, rather than developing the ‘sovereign AI’ promised by OpenAI, risks further entrenching the UK’s reliance on US Big Tech.
It is, in fact, the exact opposite of Kyle’s rhetoric: binding our country into deals with Google and OpenAI not only opens up our data to train their tools, but will force us to be a rule taker from Silicon Valley, with little agency over our own digital future.
There is a level of credulity towards the claims of Big Tech that we have come to expect from this Government – and in particular from a Secretary of State who has been described as “the honourable member for Silicon Valley”.
Ministers are facing a range of serious challenges, but they are often all too willing to see the AI products being hawked by tech giants as a near-magical solution.
Just in the past few months, we’ve heard claims that AI tools will help save vast amounts of taxpayers’ money and civil servants’ time. Ministers have claimed that AI summaries will cut the backlog of asylum cases – while downplaying findings that they will also introduce a significant number of errors into what can be a life or death decision-making process.
Documents unearthed by Foxglove, the tech justice NGO where I work, have revealed that ministers seeking to prop up an overwhelmed justice system sought ideas from tech and security companies at a recent summit. Among the suggestions: using super-computers to predict crime and the potential of “subcutaneous tracking” for “behavioural management”.
And just this week, the border security Minister said that AI tools used by online retailers to estimate age should be deployed to assess whether children seeking asylum are treated as adults.
Whatever the problem, it seems, ministers are happy to take Big Tech’s most optimistic PR fluff as the solution.
Meanwhile, the secretary of state seems to view himself primarily as a cheerleader for US tech giants with concerns being raised over just how regularly he meets with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google. He even told Amazon that he would “advocate” for them with the Government’s competition watchdog – at the same time that they were being investigated by them.
This is surprising, as just a brief look across the Atlantic will show just how closely these very same tech companies are working with Trump, to mutually advance a distinctly ‘America First’ agenda in which US dominance is secured by rolling out its AI products across the world.
In March, OpenAI submitted a formal paper to the White House calling for Trump to “proactively promote the global adoption of American AI systems” and to push “American company interests,” while attacking regulators in the EU and UK.
Trump agrees and, as ever, has little time for subtlety. He gave a speech this week launching his AI Action Plan called “Winning The AI Race”. The White House is clear on its intentions: “America’s AI Action Plan charts a decisive course to cement US dominance in artificial intelligence.” It will achieve this by “exporting American AI” to “friends and allies around the world”.
It should be obvious by now that this is not for the benefit of the UK: it is about locking in as many countries as possible to US tech infrastructure and products, so that they are under control of those businesses and by extension their government – with the gap between the former and the latter growing narrower by the day.
Most of Europe has been belatedly waking up to this uncomfortable fact: in the era of Trump, most of our digital infrastructure is owned and controlled by the tech barons who have lined up to support him.
This is particularly stark when it comes to cloud computing. From individuals to major banks to government departments, we now rely on cloud services provided by a tiny number of tech giants in order to store our data and run crucial processes.
And these firms have shown they’re willing to pull the plug on organisations which displease their President. This was demonstrated by recent reports that Microsoft cancelled the email account of a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, due to Trump’s displeasure over its action on Gaza.
Albeit belatedly, US control of the continent’s digital infrastructure has led to alarm across Europe as an unprecedently hostile administration occupies the White House and the tech giants line up behind it, aiming to use it as a battering ram against EU and UK laws which limit their behaviour.
European states and the European Commission are at least talking about how to start moving away for US tech dominance, and the overwhelming control of cloud computing by Microsoft (a partner of Open AI), Amazon and Google.
The contrast with the UK is stark. Here, ministers are – at best – burying their heads in the sand. At worst, they’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome – enthusiastically embracing the crushing grip of the tech giants.
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Rather than taking the long, hard road of building, bit by bit, vital tech infrastructure that we control ourselves, ministers have been trumpeting “investments” and “partnerships” from big tech that only put us deeper in the hole.
They are intent on pushing through a vast expansion of data centres run by the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Amazon. Just because these are physically in the UK, it doesn’t make them ‘sovereign’ – they will still be under the control of US companies who can pull the plug whenever they want.
Meanwhile, the Government is inviting in the likes of Google, OpenAI and spy-tech firm Palantir to plunder public data – which ministers themselves have described as having huge commercial value. Yet we’re asked to believe these multi-billion dollar commercial interests are here out of the goodness of their own hearts – Google is offering us services for free, we’re told.
The suspicion is that Peter Kyle, the Technology Secretary, may be the only person in this field who hasn’t heard the old cliché: if you aren’t paying, then you’re the product.