UK to invest £100m in 'world first' AI Biosecurity Lab
The chancellor will unveil AI spending aimed at shoring up the UK's defences in Wednesday's Budget.
UK to invest £100m in 'world first' AI Biosecurity Lab
The UK has said it will create a national AI Biosecurity Lab (AIBL) to bolster its defences against new biological threats.
As part of Wednesday's Budget, the government will allocate £100m to set up the new, "world first" institute, backed by leading AI firms.
The chancellor will also announce millions of pounds in funding for a series of measures designed to strengthen the UK's capacity to deal with changing cyber, biological and AI-enabled threats.
"AI will transform daily life: every firm, community, hospital, school, and every aspect of our economy can benefit," John Healey said.
"I understand and share the concerns of working people, so I am setting out a distinctively British approach to AI.
"One that doesn't leave workers behind and defends our national interest, while ensuring the benefits of AI-enabled growth are felt right across the country."
The exact role and scope of the new lab have not yet been made public.
However, AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said it would be a "major new global institution" bringing together "world-leading scientific expertise" to help ensure the UK can protect its citizens and objectives as AI advances.
"That means staying ahead of emerging threats, from cyber attacks to biological risks, while building more of the critical technology our security depends on," he said.
"By backing British science, advanced chips and our own AI companies, we can strengthen our national security, rebuild Britain's industrial strength and create good, skilled jobs across the country."
The AI Biosecurity Lab will also receive support from leading AI developers, with OpenAI and Anthropic offering £200m worth of AI model credits that can be used to access their models.
The Chancellor's push to increase AI spending will also include an extra £120m for the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI).
Created by the previous Conservative government in 2023, the lab assesses the risks posed by the most advanced and powerful models - and has been praised for helping foster a collaborative and open approach to AI testing.
The extra funding announced by the Chancellor is intended to help the lab continue its work, especially as calls grow for technical standards and guardrails around AI development.
It will be accompanied by a £60m investment in what it called a "National Cyber Shield", which it said would use agentic AI to strengthen cyber-defences, and £70m in funding for a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre.
The government said this would use AI tools to identify cyber vulnerabilities across the UK's critical infrastructure and economy.
The announcement follows the UK government's disclosure that it was among organisations worldwide that took some sites offline as a precaution after critical flaws were found in a popular programming language.
Researchers who uncovered the vulnerabilities in PHP - a widely used server-side scripting language in web development for decades - warned that platforms using it could be vulnerable to possible hacks.
So far, there have been no reports of any successful exploitation of the flaw, named php2shell.
But experts have warned that the episode shows how quickly and easily long-dormant bugs can be uncovered - and potentially exploited - with AI.