🇬🇧The UK committed £100 million to an AI biosecurity laboratory and £120 million more to its AI Security Institute.

According to a Telegram report citing a UK government statement, the government committed £100 million, reported as equivalent to $134 million, to establish an AI biosecurity laboratory. Its stated purpose is to use AI to identify and monitor biological threats, as part of measures to strengthen the government’s understanding of and response to AI-related risks.

The package includes an additional £120 million for the AI Security Institute, whose work includes continuing evaluations of frontier AI models. These are announced funding allocations; the supplied report does not establish that the laboratory is operational or that the funds have been fully disbursed.

Separate allocations comprise £65 million for developing countermeasures against pathogens and £23 million to establish an AI economics institute to study AI’s economic effects. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan described the package as addressing emerging threats, including cyberattacks and biological risks, while strengthening control over technologies important to national security.

OpenAI and Anthropic are also to provide up to £200 million in AI-model compute, distinct from the government funding. Google DeepMind and life-sciences company Basecamp Research are named as laboratory collaborators.