The UK government will commit £100 million to establishing a national AI Biosecurity Lab as part of Wednesday's Budget, billing it as a "world first" institute meant to help the country defend against emerging biological threats with the backing of leading AI firms.
"AI will transform daily life: every firm, community, hospital, school, and every aspect of our economy can benefit," Chancellor John Healey said, adding that he wanted to set out "a distinctively British approach to AI" that does not "leave workers behind." AI minister Kanishka Narayan described the lab as a "major new global institution" that would bring together "world-leading scientific expertise" to guard against both cyber attacks and biological risks.
Tech firms put up credits, not just goodwill
The lab's creation will be supported by OpenAI and Anthropic, which are together providing £200 million worth of AI model credits that researchers can draw on. The Budget will also direct an extra £120 million to the UK's AI Security Institute, established under the previous Conservative government in 2023 to evaluate risks in the most advanced AI models, plus £60 million for a "National Cyber Shield" using agentic AI to bolster cyber-defenses and £70 million for a new vulnerability-detection center for critical infrastructure.
Timed to a live cyber emergency
The announcement lands just days after the UK was among the countries forced to take some government sites offline as a precaution following the discovery of critical flaws in PHP, the programming language underpinning a large share of the web. Researchers who helped surface that vulnerability warned that AI is making it both easier to find such long-dormant bugs and, potentially, easier for attackers to exploit them — the exact dual-use dynamic the new funding is meant to address. Full details of the AI Biosecurity Lab's precise remit have yet to be published.