UK Backs AI Biosecurity Lab With £100 Million as OpenAI, Anthropic Add £200 Million Credits
Updated
Updated · bbc.co.uk · Oct 24
UK Backs AI Biosecurity Lab With £100 Million as OpenAI, Anthropic Add £200 Million Credits
3 articles · Updated · bbc.co.uk · Oct 24
Summary
£100 million in Wednesday's Budget will fund a new national AI Biosecurity Lab, which the UK calls a world-first institute to strengthen defenses against emerging biological threats.
OpenAI and Anthropic will support the lab with £200 million of model credits, while ministers say it will combine leading scientific expertise with AI tools to stay ahead of biological and cyber risks.
The package also includes £120 million more for the AI Security Institute, £60 million for a National Cyber Shield and £70 million for a vulnerability center dubbed NERV.
The wider push follows fresh concern over AI accelerating the discovery of software flaws, after organizations including the UK government took some sites offline over critical PHP vulnerabilities.
With AI currently favoring attackers, can a £100m government lab truly outpace the rapidly evolving biological and digital threats engineered by rogue actors?
Could relying on proprietary AI credits from tech giants actually blind the UK's new biosecurity lab to threats outside those specific corporate ecosystems?