UK AI policy: what the government is actually doing

Who is in charge now

Every announcement below was made by a government and a department that have since changed. Keir Starmer resigned as Labour leader in June 2026; Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026. Two days later the machinery-of-government fact sheet said that “the functions of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) will be redistributed” and that “responsibility for AI strategy, public sector AI adoption and the AI Security Institute will move to the Cabinet Office”. The Department for Business and Trade became the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) under Jonathan Reynolds, and took the research and compute programmes. Kanishka Narayan is Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, jointly in the Cabinet Office and BIST, attending Cabinet; his portfolio as listed on gov.uk includes AI Growth Zones, the AI Research Resource and Sovereign AI on the BIST side, and AI strategy, a new AI Taskforce, the AI Security Institute and public-sector adoption on the Cabinet Office side.

Three Secretaries of State held the science portfolio between the Action Plan and the reshuffle: Peter Kyle (July 2024 to September 2025), Liz Kendall (September 2025 to July 2026), and then no one, because the post was abolished. Matt Clifford, who wrote the plan, stepped back as the Prime Minister’s AI adviser at the end of July 2025; Jade Leung of the AI Security Institute was appointed to that role in August 2025.

As of 23 September 2026 we found no gov.uk document in which the Burnham government re-endorsed, revised or withdrew the Action Plan; the search covered gov.uk publications, news and speeches from 20 July 2026 onwards. The gov.uk policy paper on AI Growth Zones was updated on 10 September 2026, which suggests that strand at least continues. The Prime Minister’s UN speech of 22 September 2026, discussed below, makes commitments of his own but does not mention the plan. Everything in the table should be read as inherited policy whose current status is unstated unless the status column says otherwise.

The plan and the scorecard

The AI Opportunities Action Plan, published on 13 January 2025, made 50 recommendations. The government’s response the same day accepted 49 of them (48 agreed, one partially). Its ambitions were stated in the plan’s own words: to “expand the capacity of the AI Research Resource by at least 20x by 2030”, to “create a new unit, UK Sovereign AI”, to make Britain “an AI maker, not an AI taker”, and to build “companies at the frontier that will be our UK national champions”.

The government’s One Year On report of 29 January 2026 said: “we have now met 38 of the 50 actions – three-quarters of the Plan”. That is a self-assessment; the dashboard it launched at delivery.ai.gov.uk does not show which recommendations are complete and which are not, and no audit body has scored it. The same dashboard reported “£68 billion investment pledged since January 2025” (pledged, not delivered) and a tenfold rise in public AI compute from 2 to 21 exaflops between 2024 and 2025.

Initiative by initiative

The table separates three things the Action Plan’s numbers tend to run together: what was announced, what money was committed, and what exists.

Initiative	Announced	Money committed	Status, 23 September 2026
Isambard-AI, Bristol	November 2023; launched 17 July 2025	£225 million (public)	Operating. 5,448 Nvidia GH200 chips; about 1,000 research projects and 4,000+ users in its first year; ranked 11th–13th in the world in 2025–26.
Dawn, Cambridge: sixfold expansion	26 January 2026	£36 million	Announced for "Spring 2026". The gov.uk AI Research Resource page, updated 25 August 2026, still lists Dawn's original 1,024 Intel GPUs. No primary evidence of completion found.
AI Research Resource ×20 by 2030	13 January 2025 (plan); 9–11 June 2025 (funding)	£1 billion for compute inside a £2 billion AI allocation for 2026-27 to 2029-30 (Spending Review 2025)	Funding line exists from April 2026. A "£250 million" cloud-capacity procurement was at market-engagement stage in November 2025; no award had been published on gov.uk as of 23 September 2026.
National supercomputer, Edinburgh	Cancelled August 2024 (as an £800 million exascale machine); reinstated 12 June 2025	Up to £750 million	Under construction: turf cut 25 June 2026; the University's contractor says the building will be ready in autumn 2027. No evidence the machine itself has been procured.
AI Growth Zone: Culham, Oxfordshire	13 January 2025	Up to £5 million local support; private partner not yet chosen	Designation "subject to the agreement of a public-private partnership" (government response, January 2025). No partner announced; trade press reports a 100 MW planning application "due to be submitted". Nothing built.
AI Growth Zone: North East (Cobalt Park and Cambois/Blyth)	17 September 2025	Private pledges: Blackstone "£10 billion" at Blyth; OpenAI/Nscale/Nvidia "Stargate UK" at Cobalt Park	Stargate UK paused: OpenAI said on 9–10 April 2026 it would "move forward when the right conditions, such as regulation and the cost of energy, enable long-term infrastructure investment". Blyth: outline consent; early ground works reported; developer's opening date 2028.
AI Growth Zone: North Wales (Anglesey and Trawsfynydd)	13 November 2025	Private pledges within the government's "£28.2 billion" total for all zones	Outline planning consent for a data centre at Prosperity Parc, Anglesey (2025). No plans announced for Trawsfynydd. Nothing under construction found.
AI Growth Zone: South Wales (M4 corridor)	21 November 2025	Private: Vantage/Microsoft "£10 billion"	Microsoft's Newport data centre under construction (completion January 2027), a project that pre-dated the designation. Vantage sites have consents.
AI Growth Zone: Lanarkshire	29 January 2026	Private: "£8.2 billion" (DataVita, CoreWeave and partners)	One pre-existing 24 MW data centre operating since 2016; a £320 million second site has detailed planning approval. Nothing new operating.
Sovereign AI unit and fund	11 June 2025 (Spending Review); unit chaired by James Wise from November 2025; fund launched 17 April 2026	Up to £500 million, plus a £100 million procurement scheme	Operating. First investment (Callosum, Cambridge) April 2026; an August 2026 update listed 12 companies, 5 announced. First procurement competitions opened 31 August 2026. Amount actually disbursed not published.
US "Tech Prosperity Deal"	17–18 September 2025	"£31 billion" of private US technology pledges, within a "£150 billion" headline	The United States paused implementation in December 2025. The Business and Trade Committee (4 July 2026) called it "a non-binding framework for co-operation" that "was suspended before it could produce substantive outcomes"; a civil-nuclear strand resumed in early 2026.
Microsoft "£22 billion" / Loughton supercomputer	17 September 2025	Private: $30 billion over four years, of which $15 billion capital	Microsoft's own May 2026 account: Acton and Newport sites "nearing completion"; Loughton (with Nscale, 23,000+ GPUs) given no delivery date. Trade press reports Loughton's grid connection slipping to 2027.
Google Waltham Cross data centre	2024 ($1 billion); £5 billion two-year UK programme, 16 September 2025	Private	Opened September 2025. Google describes it as serving Cloud, Workspace, Search and Maps; it is not described as an AI-training site.
Government AI tools ("Humphrey")	21 January 2025	Not disclosed	Extract: live for every local planning authority in England from 17 June 2026. GOV.UK Chat: live in the GOV.UK app from 14 May 2026. Consult, Minute and Parlex: pilots (2025) with no published national rollout figures.
"£45 billion a year" public-sector savings	21 January 2025 (State of Digital Government review)	Not applicable (an estimate)	The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (3 June 2026) called the estimate "worryingly optimistic"; the official who produced it told MPs it was "a reasonable guess, but of course it is a guess".
TechFirst skills programme	9 June 2025	£187 million (press); "£160 million" (Spending Review text)	Government counted "1 million AI courses delivered since June 2025" (mostly free industry courses); target raised to 10 million workers by 2030. No spending outturn published.
AI Security Institute	2 November 2023	"£66m in funding per financial year" (AISI's own figure)	Operating; moved to the Cabinet Office July 2026. See What is the UK AI Security Institute?
Frontier-AI legislation	King's Speech, 17 July 2024	Not applicable	No consultation and no government bill; absent from the King's Speech of 13 May 2026 (a Private Member's Artificial Superintelligence Bill, introduced 8 September 2026, is before the Commons but is not government legislation). The Prime Minister said at the UN on 22 September 2026 that the government would act "including bringing forward new laws if that is what is needed": a statement, not a bill. See How is AI regulated in the UK?
Copyright and AI	Consultation December 2024	Not applicable	March 2026 statutory report dropped the proposed opt-out exception; no legislation.

Three things the table shows

Public compute is the one strand that has clearly delivered. Isambard-AI exists, is used, and is the country’s most powerful publicly owned AI machine. Its scale should still be stated plainly: 5,448 chips drawing about 5 megawatts, against the 100,000–200,000-chip, 300-megawatt clusters that the largest US developers were running by 2025. The government’s own Compute Roadmap (July 2025) sets a target of 420 AI exaflops by 2030, twenty times the 2025 figure, and calls the existing estate “fragmented”. Could the UK build AGI or superintelligence? puts those numbers in context.

“Growth Zone” is a designation, not a building. A zone is a promise of faster planning and grid connection for sites that can show at least 500 megawatts. Of the five, only South Wales contains a data centre under construction, and that project, Microsoft’s at Newport, was already under way when the zone was drawn around it. The most-reported project, Stargate UK, is paused; OpenAI’s stated reasons were “regulation and the cost of energy”. A freedom-of-information exercise reported in August 2026 found one relevant planning permission granted in South Oxfordshire, the district containing Culham, in the whole of 2025. The government’s “£100 billion” figure for the zones is a modelled estimate of what 4 gigawatts of capacity could attract; its “£28.2 billion” is the sum of private pledges.

The US money is a framework, not a flow. The September 2025 pledges were real announcements by real companies. But the agreement they were wrapped in was paused by the United States within three months over unrelated trade disputes, and by July 2026 a Commons committee had heard from one of the pledging firms that its plans were “correlation, not causation” and from Microsoft that its investment “continues irrespective of the technology prosperity deal”. Some of the money (Google’s Waltham Cross data centre, CoreWeave’s two 2024 sites) refers to things that were already built. The largest single item, Microsoft’s Loughton supercomputer, had no delivery date in Microsoft’s own May 2026 account.

What the Burnham government has said itself

The first substantial statement of AI policy by the Burnham government is the Prime Minister’s address to the UN General Assembly on 22 September 2026, published on gov.uk on 23 September. It is a speech, not a programme, and it makes no reference to the Action Plan; but it is primary evidence of what the new government has committed to. In it the Prime Minister said:

• “I am announcing today that we are developing a new AI defence partnership with the US.”
• “We have our world-leading AI Security Institute – working hand in glove with the US.”
• “I can announce today that I am going to put AI at the heart of the UK’s G20 Presidency next year.”
• “We will work towards agreeing a single set of global principles and standards to ensure the transparency” needed for safe development.
• The government would act on AI’s disruption “including bringing forward new laws if that is what is needed”.

Each of those is an announcement or a statement of intent; none is yet a published policy, a bill or a funded programme, and this page will move them into the table as and when they become one.

The speech also settles a question of terminology. The US President, addressing the same General Assembly session the same day, said US documents would call AI “Super Intelligence”; the rename timeline records that. The UK Prime Minister’s speech uses “AI” throughout and does not use “Super Intelligence” or “superintelligence” at all. That is positive evidence, from the primary text, that the UK government continued to use the ordinary term on 22 September 2026; it says nothing about either leader’s reasons, and this page does not speculate on them.

How to read the next announcement

The pattern of 2025–26 gives a reader a simple test for the next one. Ask which of four things it is: a target (×20 by 2030), a designation (a Growth Zone), a pledge by someone else (£10 billion from a data-centre company), or a thing that now exists (a supercomputer taking bookings). The Action Plan year produced a great many of the first three and, so far, a handful of the fourth. This page will be re-scored quarterly, and sooner if the Burnham government publishes a programme to go with the commitments in its UN speech.